How Industrial IoT Is Revamping The Way We Approach Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance has been estimated to save millions of bucks worldwide by avoiding unexpected machinery accidents. It has also been found that about 51% of industries have computerized their predictive maintenance by 2017.

The foreseeable graph is plain and simple. IoT is the future of machinery maintenance. Internet of things is about to bring the 4th industrial revolution of humankind.

It would be more appropriate to say that the revolution has already begun. To get an idea of the magnitude of IoT, take a scenario took place at a company that profited through implementing IoT in their maintenance system.

A chemical manufacturing company employed IoT predictive maintenance resulting in an 80% reduction of repair costs saving them approximately $300K per machine. The trend has started to catch on like wildfire in billion-dollar companies while simultaneously seeping into fishing towns of New England.

It is more than evident that IoT is about to revolutionize the upcoming decade like touch screens revamped our lives in 2007. But why does predictive maintenance get the highest attention amongst all industries?

To get an understanding of this cosmogonal connection between IoT and predictive maintenance, some insights are made on how IoT works.

Industrial Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IIoT) embodies machine learning and big data technology that captures relevant data to communicate, instantly updating the shortcomings in any manner, thus cutting down on major breakdowns.

Hence, IoT has been further categorized into Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), holding colossal potential in quality control, viable and environmentally conscious production processes, traceability and comprehensive supply chain productivity.

The diverse essential IIoT functionalities

IIoT transforms the way we approach machinery operations. Most fine end machinery parts go fault even with a routine predictive maintenance. IIoT has the potential to wash out these technical glitches entirely.

The diversity in which IIoT can be put into use is endless. Below are some of the industries and work models where the work downtime would be put an end completely with IIoT:

• Spindles in milling machines are fragile extremities that do the work. These are prone to break often times. Vibrative or ultrasonic sensors would eradicate this problem.
• Deposits in the conduits cause heat exchangers to clog. Measuring heat flow rate is also impossible with current workflow. Calibrating the temperature differential in the flow would stop blockages heat exchangers face.
• When the CPU, housing temperature, positioning and overload errors are constantly monitored, Robots in industries would have zero breakdown issues increasing the overall uptime.
• Lubricants & filters in hydraulic valve manufacturing require IoT gateways and sensors, the oil quality can be monitored without manual assistance and maintained a constant grade.
• The parameters of the pressing process were collected as data and fed into sensors as a reference for future pressing production. This ensured the quality management unaided and also brought in production transparency.

Many such industries have benefited from centralized monitoring and automation by ruling out common errors, bringing in a well-rounded production rate. Ticket allocation system, cooling systems, Cycle time monitoring, Cutting fluids monitoring and many more industries have adopted IIoT predictive maintenance to cut down on machine downtime.

IoT is flexible to suit your needs and be applied to assist in increasing product quality for all fields.

The technology of Industrial IoT

The importance of Industrial IoT becomes evident when large labels like Hitachi, Airbus, Komatsu etc., have dedicated billions in developing readily available IoT solutions for sale. These products range from robotics, self-driving automotives, Tracking and tracing softwares to warehouse assistance.

This goes on to dismiss the myth that IoT assists only in the quality assurance of products. Healthcare industry and agriculture are among the top 5 industries that employ IoT, the most listing only below logistics and manufacturing.

Industrial IoT is travelling the high road in automation and is no way slowing down its pace in the foreseeable future. By increasing the accuracy in machine performance, we not only save millions, but are also on the path that would save time, fuel and energy, benefitting the humankind. It is high-time we migrate to a new industrial ecosystem that is more kind towards our planet. IoT throws some light on the scope of doing the very same.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.