The Internet of (Green) Things

by | Jul 8, 2014

This article is included in these additional categories:

david dornfeldOr … what would my refrigerator tell me if it could talk?

Recently I was at a conference on manufacturing where I was caught in in an avalanche of buzzwords … cloud, big data, internet of things, industrial internet, connectivity, connected revolution and so on. This feeding frenzy of connectivity and data is driven by a number of things, real and imagined. Businesses see opportunity for enhanced productivity and reduced time from design to production. Other businesses see opportunities for providing services and products to an informed customer – all at much greater speed. Others still see a chance to offer analysis capabilities to convert the “firehose stream of data” to a manageable set of results and metrics.

For example, in the manufacturing domain, General Electric is driving the creation of an “industrial internet” which GE expects will define how “industrial equipment with sophisticated sensors will be linked over a network that connects people to machines and machines to one another to boost efficiency.” They won’t be talking to refrigerators, at first, but jet engines to indicate potential maintenance requirement or, closer to the factory, failure potential and maintenance needs of sensor-enabled machinery on the factory floor.

In the manufacturing space. a leading commercial computer aided manufacturing (CAM) software provider, DP Technology/ESPRIT, has introduced a cloud-enabled tool path planning capability  – cloud-enabled CAM. The ESPRIT MachiningCloud Connection gives programmers (the smart folks that create the instructions and select the tooling to allow sophisticated numerically controlled machine tools to create the complex physical components that make up manufactured products) access to complete and up-to-date tooling product data, cutting hours of programming time by eliminating manual tool creation. This would have been done with physical paper catalogs of tools, configurations, cutting inserts, and other peripheral hardware to make it work (think of shopping at Sears or Target before websites, online catalogs or Amazon! If you are old enough to recall Sear’s paper catalog which was like a phone book for a large city, if you are old enough to remember phone books too, it is an interesting but long and manual process!). This capability simplifies the selection of cutting tools and, better yet,  offers a list of recommended cutting tools based on machining features and machining sequences that are planned. Finally, the programmer or manufacturing engineer can simulate the machine operation and behavior with accurate 3D models of tool components and assemblies.

Additional articles you will be interested in.

Stay Informed

Get E+E Leader Articles delivered via Newsletter right to your inbox!

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Share This