FERSA, which provides complete bearing solutions for the automotive industry worldwide, scooped the Industry 4.0 Award at a recent manufacturing event
After showcasing advanced digital twin technologies installed at their factory, including the iSCAN near real-time dashboards developed through the R&D project, STREAM-0D, FERSA was awarded the Industry 4.0 Award.
STREAM-0D is a European-wide research project which has the ambition to tackle one of the main challenges of the manufacturing industry: reaching a zero-defect production. As part of the STREAM-0D project, IES has been using a specially designed version of their iSCAN digital twin data management and interrogation tool at FERSA’s ball bearing production line to collect and automatically analyse data at 1-second resolution from across 129 sensors.
iSCAN (Intelligent Control and Analysis) is one of the tools belonging to IES’s new Intelligent Communities Lifecycle (ICL) platform – the new environmental digital twin for healthy and sustainable communities. iSCAN allows you to centralise any time-series data from different BMS systems, utility meters, sensors and portable data loggers in one platform.
The STREAM-0D version of iSCAN is an even more powerful variant of the software specifically developed for the manufacturing environment and its massive data generation demands. Delivering near real-time views of production performance from any location worldwide, FERSA showcased its capabilities live at the event in Mexico demonstrating how it was possible to keep track of production almost exactly as it was taking place, even when located the other side of the world.
FERSA has instrumentalised their lines heavily and invested in multiple sensors and data collection. But they needed a system that could deliver intelligent faults and alarms, and which allowed key staff to keep track of production even when they were away from the shop floor. The aim of the system is to catch and eliminate defects as they happen so that production waste is greatly reduced and quality assured.
The iSCAN dashboards, developed in close collaboration with FERSA, automatically take data from the sensors, and interrogate and analyse it almost simultaneously to plot 10 key metrics chosen by FERSA, such as temperature changes. When items are coming off the production line every 20 seconds you need to get the information as close to real-time as possible. Which is what is possible using the iSCAN platform and dashboards developed by IES for this STREAM-OD project.
FERSA is one of the pilot sites of STREAM-0D and was participating in the Sisamex Suppliers on 2 May 2019 when they won the Industry 4.0 Award as well as top 2018 component supplier. Going forward IES and FERSA plan to expand on the 10 metrics currently developed and add to the system so that it delivers even more power from the data available.
STREAM-0D aims at creating an innovative control system integrated in production lines. The solution uses multi-physics simulation models, fed with actual data from online measurements, to predict the product quality indicators in response to critical input parameters. Based on the model prediction, production can be adjusted to meet the exact design specifications. Therefore, STREAM-0D will reduce product variability, increase the line flexibility, and eventually achieve zero defect production.
To find out more about the project please visit www.stream-0d.com.
