On November 7 and 8, 2023, everything in the Stuttgart trade fair halls will revolve around industrial maintenance and smart maintenance of production facilities. The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern will present its software solutions in the Innovation Area in Hall 2A.
The name of the ITWM department says it all: »System Analysis, Prognosis and Control«. The researchers from Kaiserslautern develop AI-based technologies for real-time plant operation and drive technology. The focus is on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) methods in signal-processing analyses. In this way, they enable the safe monitoring of operating states and the resource-saving predictive maintenance of plants.
Industrial plants are monitored with a range of sensors for control and monitoring, and their data is often stored in cloud systems for analysis. However, information security concerns or the volumes of data generated at high sampling rates require smarter solutions at the interface between the control cabinet and the intranet. The researchers at Fraunhofer ITWM are equipping edge devices in the control cabinet with software that collects information relevant to the process from the signals of all sensors and enables, for example, an artificial intelligence to generate targeted warnings or suggestions. The software is independent of the measuring system so that maintenance applications can be implemented precisely for each machine or production line.
A wide variety of sensors can be used, for example acceleration, distance and current sensors or even industrial cameras. One of the sensors used by the Fraunhofer ITWM, which has many years of experience in condition monitoring systems, is a magnetostrictive sensor for the contactless detection of torques.
With the cement mills of Gebrüder Pfeiffer SE from Kaiserslautern, the intelligent Edge devices are tested in real production operations. »When crushing construction debris, there are large forces that cause the mills to vibrate and accelerate their wear,« explains Dr. Benjamin Adrian, deputy head of the department »System Analysis, Prognosis and Control«. »We can prevent this by using a digital twin to optimize machine settings and transfer them to the real mills.«
Dr. Benjamin Adrian and his team will represent Fraunhofer ITWM in Stuttgart with their own booth in the Innovation Area in Hall 2A, together with their cooperation partner Magnetic Sense. Adrian will also give a presentation entitled »The Drive Shaft Sees Everything! Condition monitoring with non-contact rotary sensor technology.«
He can be heard on November 7 at 3:30 p.m. in the Technical Forum (booth no. 2D21) in Hall C2.
Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM