Digitalization of compressed air: Air Management System

2024-05-19

This solution, unique on the market, monitors the status of the compressed air system using intelligent and flexible control elements, allowing for personalized, efficient, fast and sustainable manufacturing.

In current and future industrial automation and control applications, it will be necessary to analyze a large amount of data (IT environment) extracted in real time at the field level (OT environment) in order to optimize the OEE and energy efficiency of the machines.

This transition towards IT and OT convergence facilitates the implementation of the IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things), thanks to its high data processing and transmission capacity.

When updating or developing this infrastructure, it is worth considering technologies that promote IT/OT convergence, such as OPC UA, Ethernet and IO-Link communication protocols that provide flexibility to production processes.

An example of the IIoT application using these technologies is SMC ‘s Air Management System (AMS) .

This industrial automation and control system allows you to monitor the temperature, pressure and flow of your processes, as well as program disconnection times and waiting cycles to save energy during periods of low activity.

With the adoption of this new and revolutionary air management unit, reductions of up to 62% in compressed air consumption can be achieved, with the consequent benefit for both the environment and the bottom line.

In a manufacturing plant, inefficient energy consumption is mainly due to inadequate control of air consumption, non-detection of leaks and the use of processes that are not optimized in terms of standby and shutdown times. This leads to higher costs, as well as unexpected problems due to inadequate maintenance planning and insufficient actions.

Smart maintenance

SMC’s Air Management System, AMS, solution, in addition to monitoring air consumption, monitors the pressure and temperature of the air lines to establish baseline parameters for your machines and factories.

The analysis of the collected data allows establishing the basis for defining preventive actions and maintenance tasks. This is important, as maintenance teams often find it difficult to collect specific data from airlines, leading to insufficient maintenance and unexpected failures or power consumption spikes.

The Air Management System provides benefits for both predictive maintenance and condition-based monitoring strategies as data collection helps detect leaks and provides a fingerprint of preferred working conditions.

The system also monitors equipment health to analyze variations and subsequently reduce downtime, waste, and the need for corrective action.

Greater efficiency, less CO 2

Through programmable automatic pressure reduction and shutdown times, this solution allows users to reduce both compressed air and energy consumption, improving process efficiency and reducing CO 2 emissions generated by the production of compressed air. Alongside these enhanced maintenance capabilities, users can take advantage of facility digitalization to increase levels of control. This solution uses the advantages of innovative wireless technology, which is easily integrated and avoids the need to use communication cables.

Wireless communication is extremely beneficial since it avoids implementing electrically complex solutions with excessive wiring and eliminates the possibility of making errors during cable connection. Additionally, wired systems increase the complexity of device configuration tasks and require a PLC or edge server, and long-distance communication can slow down.

On the contrary, AMS favors savings in both time and costs by requiring less installation and commissioning work, less wiring and fewer connectors and connection points. The decentralized system supports OPC UA for direct data communication connection without the need for a PLC, as well as the use of Ethernet I/P, Profinet and IO-Link devices.

Sustainable solution

The AMS series is a sustainable solution that provides a benefit to any compressed air user, regardless of whether it is an application in the general manufacturing, automotive, machine tool, electronics, packaging, textile, food, forestry/paper industries. , life science…

At SMC we are committed to reducing CO 2 emissions and energy consumption to move together towards sustainable productivity .