Heavy industry. The phrase conjures images of mines and steel mills, of huge caverns underground, of cavern-like factories, of oldline companies operating heavy-duty machines for hightorque work. That's the image of heavy industry. Today, though, there's also another image. It's of an operator walking a steel mill's floor, looking at his smartphone or his tablet.

The theme of this issue is integration. Mechanical components are being developed with embedded sensors. The components are talking to each other, sending information to the cloud and producing terabytes of big data to help manufacturers better understand their processes, predict problems and control costs.

Experienced operators can often tell if a machine is not working properly, on the basis that it does not ‘sound right.’ The same principle can be applied — using modern electronics — to identify the exact cause of the problem. Sensitive accelerometers can detect and analyze the vibrations from industrial equipment, highlighting problems such as misalignment or bearing imbalance. The technique is known as vibration analysis. It can identify bearing failure in the very early stages, when there is a microscopic defect on the raceway, for example. The problem is that the identifying signal is usually drowned out in all the other noise emanating from the machine.

For a 5-megawatt wind turbine prototype, aerodyn employs the latest control and software technologies, including a comprehensive PC-based control solution and the new modular TwinCAT Wind Framework. The TwinCAT Wind Framework features the latest software engineering and Big Data applications to extend current Industry 4.0 concepts to the wind energy industry. The modular software supports, for example, the direct provision of sensor data to the operator’s database, and in general enables the easy adaption of the wind turbine operation management to future requirements.

Norkol Converting Corporation is one of the nation’s leading independently owned converters and distributors of commercial printing papers. The company has full production capabilities and state-of-the-art machinery for winding, trimming and sheeting. The company utilizes traditional slitter re-wind equipment that unwinds, slits and then re-winds paper to new dimensions. These conventional re-winders, while typically producing new widths of paper with clean cuts, work at an inefficient, slow pace.

New generation sensors are improving our quality of life.

This paper provides an overview of the more common position sensor options and references actual case studies to illustrate the diverse solutions available and the reasons behind some of the decisions. Three cases are used to illustrate the needs of different applications leading to the choice of a particular type of position sensor. The cases reviewed include a gantry crane, wind turbine and aerial cable car.

In keeping with a national push to bring greater energy efficiency to wastewater treatment plants, a Pennsylvania facility used data loggers to analyze motor utilization, a first step toward cutting energy costs and meeting environmental rules.

Now more than ever, manufacturing companies are examining what steps need to be taken to ensure improvements to machine reliability by predicting system failures and minimizing downtime.

Bearings with integrated sensors are used in a wide variety of applications, but many potential industrial uses are not yet implemented.