NFPA’s recent International Economic Outlook Conference in suburban Chicago featured a panel that discussed fluid power working with mobile and industrial machinery to drive efficiency, as reported here. Panelists also touched on the industrial markets and what they see happening in the near future.
Safety, please
“Machine safety has taken a higher priority recently,” said Jon Jensen, Product Sales Manager for Energy Related Products, SMC Corp. “Some of that’s driven by Europe and other markets where certain standards for machine safety, certain ISO standards, generally have almost the force of law that machines will not be sold in Europe unless they meet certain standards. A lot of our larger sized industrial customers, the Fortune 100 companies, have a global footprint … I think honestly, you’re seeing machine safety being important here because it makes sense to be consistent across the globe as far as your safety standards and there’s probably some driven by fear of litigation.”
Jensen said that if a company was aware of a safer way to build a machine in Europe and it didn’t do that in the U.S., it could find itself in legal troubles.
“That’s been followed by food safety as well,” he said. “There have been some recent changes in laws all over the globe as far as food safety is concerned. So that’s been a priority for not only the end users of industrial machines, but the machine builders as well.”
For Anant Jain, Area Sales Manager, Danfoss Power Solutions, safety can also mean more automation, taking operators out of dangerous situations.
“What can I do to take the operator out of things and then put them in a safer environment where they are still observing a process?” he asked. “What we did is we adopted the SAE standard for the level of autonomy that you will often see in the automotive space. Level zero is non-autonomous operation right now all the way to level five, where the entire operation is fully autonomous. For level one, we think about that as kind of a cruise control. Level two where there is some kind of operator intervention — okay, you can stay in the lane. Then it comes to the level three, you can take the operator out of the machine, but you will still need that operator to observe the people. That’s the type of operation that we are targeting right now, and something we have achieved.”
Incorporating electrics
On the pneumatic side, Jensen is seeing the move towards electric actuation.
“It is certainly happening, using electric actuators to replace a pneumatic cylinder and pneumatic actuator. But we’re seeing a bigger trend towards ‘electronification,’ because the control is important. We’re seeing some very innovative electronic controls that are wireless — especially on rotating equipment and things like that where it’s difficult to deal with connectable. You still need certain data and feedback and position sensing and all those kinds of things on pneumatic systems, but the controls are getting a lot more sophisticated — and a lot easier to use and easier to implement,” Jensen said.
Jain said that autonomy is sort of an electronics enabler for hydraulics because many of the smaller functions that the operator used to do are becoming control-by-wire or drive-by-wire.
“For brakes, they are becoming drive-by-wire right now as well as steering,” Jain said. “Essentially the hydraulics, due to its inherent advantage of power density, is not going away. It’s getting more electrified or more electronified. We do see all these electromagnetic actuators coming out at the edge of where the pneumatics ends and hydraulics starts. And at least at Danfoss, we have only seen few cases where hydraulics hasn’t been affected.”
Be flexible
Jensen also spoke about customers’ desire for flexibility, in addition to wanting more automation and more precise control. He gave an example from the packaging industry, to explain the concept.
“In years past, one machine did one task and that’s all it ever did. But now, automated case packers, for example, are expected to handle multiple sizes of packages. Machines that package product are meant to handle multiple sizes. Precision control and flexibility mean that one machine can be multi-purpose and multi-task. I think that’s becoming important,” he said. “For automation, we’re seeing certain industries with labor shortages or where the pool of people interested in factory type jobs is shrinking. So, companies, including ourselves, are having to automate tasks that might have traditionally been done by a machine operator or by a person doing packaging by hand. That kind of automation, even to machine tending with adding components to a machine or put feeding product to it, those are starting to be considered as targets for automation.”
Filed Under: Electrification, Trending
