Pneumatic machinery and components have been a fixture in the food industry for many decades due to their reliability and simplicity on the plant floor. As companies embrace Industry 4.0, machine builders have begun to add more predictive intelligence to valves, pumps and motors as end users demand more diagnostics.
A recent forecast by Technavio, a market research company, shows that the pneumatic equipment market is set to grow at nearly five percent a year from 2016 to 2020. More importantly, a recent asset management study, from Genpact Research Institute, reveals that plant managers are ready to devote more resources toward Industrial Internet of Things initiatives. However, the study says “only 25 percent of those surveyed believe they have a clear IIoT strategy and, of those, only 24 percent are happy with its execution, so far.”
While there’s some confusion about direction, end users are completely understand the need for reliability on the plant floor.
“For end users, it’s all about the uptime of the machine and how can they minimize any unscheduled down time,” says Erl Campbell, product manager at Aventics, a supplier of pneumatic equipment and technology.
Aventics recently released a technical paper, “New Developments in Pneumatic Valve Technology for Packaging Application,” on the benefits of remote valve intelligence for packaging machines as more enterprises connect SCADA platforms to the entire plant. One trend identified is for pneumatic-driven actuators to have sensors to capture motion data from the pneumatic cylinder via input/output (I/O) links.
A second one is for advanced digital bus modules being added to manifold valve systems. “Bringing serial communication into the valve bank eliminates the individual wiring done in the past,” says Campbell. “This can allow a machine builder to daisy chain manifolds to each other on the same serial communication line.”
Pneumatic suppliers, such as Festo, Parker Hannifin and ASCO Numatics, also see the connected transformation and want to be part of it.
“Diagnostics may be the biggest factor for fieldbus manifolds becoming the standard,” says Kevin Gough, account manager at Cross Company’s Motion Solutions Group. Today’s fieldbus manifolds can relay information regarding shorted coils, power losses, open circuits and error logs.
“The actual hardware costs of a fieldbus manifold are comparable to a traditional setup when you factor in the price of a PLC output module. If a system has over 8 valve coils, a fieldbus node is usually more cost effective,” according to Gough.
Not only is that good news for packaging application, but food processing machine designs. Depending on the type of equipment, a processing machine can typically have many more solenoid valves than your typical packaging machine.
“Many process machines send an air signal to another type of valve that will bring one fluid in, and the layout can have a large density of valves,” says Campbell. “The cost savings is greater than a packaging machine, where you may have 10 or 12 valves, while on a process machine it may be 30 or even 60 valves running a process.”
The digital transformation to Industry 4.0 is well underway and pneumatic technology is making strides to be part of the story.
Parker Hannifin, www.parker.com, 800/272-7537
ASCO Numatics, www.asco.com, 800/972-2726
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