Advanced SM Analytics - Industry Use Case

Finishing processes such as grinding, lapping, honing, etc. are key value addition steps in precision manufacturing processes. Higher the precision required, costlier is the product. It has been estimated that surface generation costs are around $200 billion dollars worldwide. By using the smart manufacturing technologies, we can reduce the costs of surface generations in precision manufacturing. Here we have successfully demonstrated an application which predicts the surface roughness from the sensor signal in real time along with different quality and performance metrics of the machine.

Value Prospects - Improved

Asset management and condition based monitoring
Performance assessment and fault monitoring
Quality assurance
Continuous health monitoring and productivity of the machine.
Visualization of operations using time portraits, FFT and spectrogram to detect anomalies.
Real-time prediction of surface roughness with an accuracy of 90% using a tuned algorithm.
Instant detection of abnormal parts produced.
A time lag of less than 5 seconds between the actual operation and its display on the dashboard.

Smart Manufacturing Real-Time Machine Performance and Productivity Dashboard

Importance of Surface Roughness Measurement

Many industries use a batch production system and perform quality control only after the batch is manufactured. The post process measurement of surface roughness takes 20 -40 % of the total time required to manufacture the product according to the specifications. In case of any defect in the grinding wheel during machining of the initial parts it will be replicated in all the following parts of the batch. These defects will be caught during the quality inspection stage and the full batch might need to be reworked to get the correct specification.

In contrast the performance dashboard displays the surface roughness value instantaneously after the part is machined. If a known defect occurs the operator will be alerted and can take a corrective action immediately. This will prevent other bad parts production and less amount of rework to be done which in turn saves time and money.

Highlights

Experimental

Set Up

A plunge grinding process is used to demonstrate the use and effectivity of a real-time performance dashboard coupled with a high data streaming cloud service.

Smart Manufacturing Performance

Dashboard

NI LabView is used to create a smart manufacturing performance dashboard which analyzes and displays performance metrics from real-time streaming of data from the cloud.

Smart Manufacturing Dashboard Implementation

A quick guide details the tools need to make a custom smart manufacturing dashboard.