Drives & Controls June 2022

n TALKING INDUSTRY Talking about maintenance live and online Modern maintenance practices formed the cornerstone of recent Talking Industry events, both live and online. The maintenance session at Talking Industry Live, at the Drives and Controls show in April, was followed by the 12th Talking Industry virtual event. Consultant editor Andy Pye reports on both. 38 June 2022 www.drivesncontrols.com A cross the three days of the recent Drives & Controls show at the Birmingham NEC, a total of eight Talking Industry Live panel discussions took place, covering many aspects of advanced manufacturing, including robotics, additive manufacturing, cybersecurity and more. The maintenance event was chaired by Prof John Ahmet Erkoyuncu, head of the Centre for Digital Engineering and Manufacturing at Cranfield University. His panellists were Daniel Phillips-Fern from Ixon UK, Keith Gallant from RMS Reliability, and Matt Grogan from SPM Instruments UK. Erkoyuncu set the scene with an overview of current issues in maintenance and asset management and how Industry 4.0 is playing a key role in these activities. He emphasised the importance of taking an holistic view of how to accumulate and use data. Digital technologies, he emphasised, should not be considered as targets in themselves, but we should be looking instead at how we can apply them to derive benefits. Controversially, Daniel Phillips-Fern from Ixon said that one of the things that he hears a lot is that the cloud is not safe, and that machines should not be connected to the cloud. “It is true that there is a lot of danger out there with hackers and malware,” he conceded, “but we believe that the connected machine is the safest option. “If you think back to 2017/2018, when the NHS was attacked,” Phillips-Fern continued, “it happened because the XP-based machines and systems were not secure. They were neither up-to-date, nor patched. Similarly, if you buy a machine today in 2022, bear in mind that Windows 10 goes out of out-of- spec in 2025.” A quick poll of the audience for the panel session at the show revealed that only one person was on Windows 11! From a machine perspective, the software is going to go out- of-date quickly. “Suddenly, when in 2025 there are no more updates for Windows 10 (or Linux), there’s an insecure machine set in your network,” Phillips-Fern warned. Turning to data collection and analysis, he continued: “Many companies are still not making the most of the opportunity to provide insight into machines by monitoring critical components that are subject to wear and tear. How many machine-builders know how many strokes a machine has run? What if you could get an alert or notification that a part needs to be replaced in 20,000 cycles, eliminating downtime, and implementing a planned maintenance cycle? “It's often thought that you need to plaster your machine with sensors to get any useful information out of it,” Fern added. “Actually, even basic data like temperature, vibration, motor speed and health, can all be accessed through a simple PLC. There are times when you need to add extra sensors to a machine, depending on what kind of insight you want to get, but basic information is already available on the PLC, so why not use it? Everyone talks about machine learning and AI, but why not just learn from your machines to begin with?” Matt Grogan from the condition- monitoring specialist SPM commented: “On a slightly different tack, we tend to start from the standpoint of looking for high-quality data, first and foremost. And then taking that data and converting it into smart data, we can determine a machine’s condition. The emphasis is on using tried-and-tested The Talking Industry Live panel discussions at the recent Drives & Controls Show were the first in-person versions of the Talking Industry sessions that began life as a series of online sessions during the pandemic.