Drawing on the four industrial revolutions to promote the development of industrial Internet of Things

Author: Colin Geis, United States Red Lion Controls Product Marketing Manager

Historically, it has not been a new concept to maximize the use of existing equipment by extending the life of industrial equipment, as it not only saves costs but also strengthens the company's cornerstone.

It is well known that industry originated in the first industrial revolution (1780 - 1840), at which it completed the transition from piecemeal manual production to machine-assisted production, driven by the hydraulic and steam power of the plant machinery and tools. of.

Subsequently, in the second industrial revolution (1870 -1914), industrial production introduced new technologies and electric energy. Electricity provides uninterrupted lighting throughout the day, increasing production continuity and allowing workers to produce day and night. However, many of the equipment in the first industrial revolution phase can still be used normally at this stage. The factory did not directly replace the equipment, but simply replacing the steam power with the electric motor successfully completed the transformation of the equipment. This retrofit requires little investment, but it extends the life of the equipment while benefiting from continuous power supply, now offering higher productivity.

The third industrial revolution (1947-2010), also known as the digital revolution, originated from the invention of transistors. The advent of transistors drove the invention of computers, and since then computers have been widely used in automated ways to support waste and increase productivity. Although the automation of plant equipment increases productivity, a large number of new and new machines are still required to be purchased and used. These fixed asset investments can further increase output and reduce losses, thus raising the factory's production level to a new level. At this point, localized control and monitoring began to appear in the manufacturing plant. In order to achieve maximum productivity, workers must monitor important factors in the operation of the equipment: for example, monitoring machine resources and monitoring equipment status.

Today, the fourth industrial revolution – the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is once again focused on industrial process improvements, reducing waste and downtime by connecting all supply chains to enable data communication between deployed equipment and industrial processes. The digital revolution (the third industrial revolution) automates production, and the fourth industrial revolution is primarily about connecting and integrating large amounts of data scattered throughout the organization. Data extracted from existing equipment enables intelligent operation, increasing productivity and reducing time-to-market through transparent industrial processes.

For existing facilities, the integration of production information is complex when optimizing each individual industrial process. Some obstacles can be easily overcome by simply using a media converter that enables media type conversion via a media converter (for example, from Ethernet to fiber optic networks, or from an RS-232 serial bus to Ethernet). Thereby physically connecting to the device. When data communication not only has physical connection barriers, but also logical barriers, the integration of production information will be more difficult. For example, plant equipment used to perform special tasks uses communication protocols with special parameters and cannot share information with other machines or machine components. For communication between these completely different protocols (for example, between the Siemens S7 TCP/IP protocol and the AB DF1 serial protocol), an industrial IoT protocol converter, such as the Red Staple Controlled Data StaTIon Plus, is required, regardless of the source program. The difference is how they can achieve a smooth exchange of data.

When equipment from different manufacturers are all connected, the plant can more easily access operational data to increase the transparency of industrial processes and increase productivity and operational efficiency through real-time communication and data processing.

In the fourth industrial revolution, forward-thinking manufacturers once again leveraged existing equipment investments by retrofitting existing machines and adding industrial automation and networking equipment that supports the Industrial Internet of Things. Throughout the four industrial revolutions, the transformation of existing machines has provided manufacturers with a large return at every stage, namely continuous power and continuous production capacity, higher production efficiency, and real realities realized by data exchange and analysis. Intelligent production.

As can be seen from past trends, higher returns can be achieved and greater success can be achieved by extending the life of existing equipment.

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