Edge Controller from B&R brings flexibility to paint shops and makes them Industry 4.0 ready.

The construction equipment industry is one of the most dynamic and competitive industries. The industry has been a front-runner to bring the latest technology in practice and leverage benefits to boost business values. Construction equipment industry strives for better product quality by continuously improving their production process. However, increasing global demands have made manufacturers operate intensively to maximise productivity, improve efficiency, minimise downtime and stay competitive. Maintaining high-level availability in production lines is a top priority for such manufacturing set-ups.  

One of the significant areas to maximise availability in construction equipment manufacturing plant is the paint shop. Paint provides aesthetic value and boosts physical properties of equipment. It offers durability, resistance against corrosion, adds mechanical protection, and guards against weather conditions, since equipment are typically deployed in all terrains and conditions. Paint shops perform deposition and curing processes that involves various operations and components such as paint booths, ovens and inspection that has significant consumption of electricity, compressed air, hot and chilled water. Improving paint shop process by automating sequence of operation, ensuring manufacturing line uptime and minimising energy consumption are crucial goals for manufacturers. Given the complexity of process, paint shop management is often the most critical area in manufacturing process and is very high on capital as well as operational costs. A comprehensive system is needed to fulfill demands of a paint shop in an efficient and economical way.

The painting process is a complex, multistage and extremely energy intensive, which has a high impact on operational costs as well as environment. Paint shops still function largely in manual operation while facing challenges to handle large volume of products and deliver them with the highest quality. In addition, handling product changeover might become a huge task to accommodate new products such as excavators, backhoe loaders, and wheel loaders on same line. Repeated work with manual controls, excess usage of raw materials and energy, delay in changeovers and less transparency leads to lower efficiency of paint shop. 

With integration of automation, it brings flexibility to such manufacturing lines and helps improve productivity of paint shop. Edge Controller from B&R helps to monitor paint shops, increase efficiency and provides transparency. Edge Controller is a powerful factory automation solution that enables any industry to control and optimise production process. The system is capable of automating and monitoring operation for a complete painting process. It provides flexibility to change materials and colours more frequently, allowing simplified production planning. With precise control functions, Edge Controller enables manufacturing set-ups to improve quality, reduce waste and ensure painting process availability.

With Edge Controller, not only is process automated but also adds transparency to the line. Edge Controller consists of core components to support data management using Process Data Acquisition (PDA). It has ability to accurately track paint mixes and their usage throughout the system, as well as to maintain historical integrity of paint mixes over time. Manufacturing units can utilise the power of PDA to manage paint inventories more effectively. Understanding consumption level helps manufacturers to stock paint inventories to optimum level against standard practice of stocking excess paint. This in turn lowers overall inventory cost and reduces wastes since paints have relatively shorter shelf life. In addition, the system can connect with legacy controllers in paint shop using industrial communication protocol such as MQTT, OPC UA, AMQP or I/Os and collect operational data in real time. Edge Controller converts data to valuable and actionable information for any manufacturing set-up. The collected process parameters are aligned to KPIs of paint shop and presented in customised format as reports and dashboards. With real time data, manufacturers can perform detailed analysis to optimise the process. Edge Controller is also capable of offering various business intelligence solutions, which support decision-making.

In terms of energy used in a construction equipment manufacturing line, paint shop is undisputedly the biggest consumer, accounting for more 50 per cent of energy required for the entire production process. The typical paint shop consists of pre-treatment process, series of coating operations and final inspection line. The process makes use of electricity, natural gas, compressed air and water, which forms main energy sources in paint shops. It is essential to understand the usage of energy in order to reduce or optimise consumption. Therefore, it calls for an efficient and integrated energy monitoring solution that can identify, evaluate area consuming higher energy and take necessary action. 

With EnMon, B&R offers innovative energy monitoring solution, which helps paint shops to optimise process by having a comprehensive energy management system. EnMon is an integral part of the Edge Controller, which keeps continuous track of all consumption and shares data to central control system. It allows manufacturers to gain a detailed picture of energy consumption and take targeted action to optimise it. EnMon is precisely tailored to ensure implementation of the latest energy management systems standard, ISO 50001. The system tracks progress of energy and material flows, such as electricity, water, power, pressure and steam, both in paint lines and in all ancillary processes. It helps to identify originator of individual consumption and logs in report in real time. The reports build a solid foundation for manufacturers to identify consumption pattern and take measures to optimise energy and achieve better results.

Paint shops require significant care and attention to ensure smooth and seamless operation. Quality has been a key principle and manufacturers are constantly working on improving quality to stay competitive. Robust product engineering practices are adhered in order to ensure the highest quality, which are consistent with global standards.  Improper functioning or unplanned downtime of equipment 

and devices usually leads to declining paint booth performance and poor final paint quality. Rotating equipment such as compressors, pumps and motors exhibit a certain degree of vibration. Due to continuous operation and material deposition, the amount of vibration or product temperature increases causing equipment failures. It may result in line stoppages bringing complete operations to a standstill. It not just affects paint shop functions but also degrades quality of paint on product. Therefore, monitoring of asset conditions becomes crucial to spot upcoming equipment failure and trigger maintenance to take necessary action proactively.

B&R gives manufacturers the ability to predict system and equipment failures before they happen, in order to increase availability and reduce maintenance costs. ConMon, a condition monitoring solution from B&R, which is integrated in the Edge Controller precisely detects cases of abnormal vibrations and indicates in real time to operators. B&R ConMon is extremely easy to configure and can be used in any control topology with no limitations. A significant benefit of the solution is that it performs vibration analysis, right on the module and generates fully processed results. The results provide detailed insight into system mechanics, allowing existing processes to be optimised with maximum efficiency, enhanced quality and improved health of paint line.

Construction equipment manufacturing lines are gearing up to meet dynamic demands of global market through continuous technological development, process standardisation, increasing product quality and emphasising improvement of KPIs. Manufacturers are concentrating on energy and operational efficiency combined with flexible painting process as one of the focus areas. With collaborative approach of process automation and continuous innovation, maximum productivity can be achieved in paint shop. Edge Controller from B&R helps manufacturers in designing a highly flexible and efficient paint shop with a single system incorporating process data acquisition, energy monitoring and condition monitoring. With powerful software and scalable hardware, Edge Controller brings flexibility to paint shop and makes them Industry 4.0 ready.