Plenty of room for pneumatic technology in Industry 4.0

Less wiring and more remote diagnostic capability provides reasons for food and beverage companies to include pneumatic-based machinery in their future.

Machine builders are moving quickly toward more serial bus communication for valve manifold designs, taking advantage of quicker commissioning and more reliability for end users.
Machine builders are moving quickly toward more serial bus communication for valve manifold designs, taking advantage of quicker commissioning and more reliability for end users.

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.

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