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Predictive maintenance has been a long and never-ending quest, and not just in industrial automation. A study by GE and Accenture holds up to executives predictive maintenance as the key to lowering maintenance costs up to 30 percent and slashing up to 70 percent of production line downtime caused by equipment breakdowns. As Industry 4.0 evolves from theory to actual working applications, a golden age of predictive maintenance may finally be dawning. That’s because the same industrial networks needed to connect production and factory equipment and make them more intelligent also provides the nervous system for communicating vital information about the health of machine components.
For example, a not uncommon concern of pneumatic motion systems is a voltage sag on long wiring runs that may cause valve misfires and quality problems. If voltage sensors on the valve manifolds are wired to the factory network, then a voltage sag might be easily identified as the source of the problem. Another example a component that is nearing the end of its expected cycle count being replaced during planned downtime instead of during an unexpected shut down.
For intelligent manufacturing plants to utilize data for predictive maintenance, the network needs to receive sensor data. Many machine components already have ways to communicate with the factory network via protocols such as Ethernet/IP, EtherCAT and PROFINET. The challenge is the high cost of bringing Industrial Ethernet communication, both wiring and provisioning, all the way to the many sensor nodes. What industry needs for the Industry 4.0 revolution is a practical protocol for connecting sensors to the network. Fortunately, simple serial protocols such as IO-Link have emerged, providing easily provisioned, low-cost communication at the edge.
With this potential...