KraussMaffei officials say the company’s portfolio of digital manufacturing technologies can help plastics processors monitor production, improve process stability, reduce downtime and simplify operations.
The company's flagship smart factory platform is socialProduction, a family of digital products primarily designed for injection molding machines. It is accessible from a web browser or mobile app and provides different levels of information depending on the user's role. It works in conjunction with the smartCube, an edge computing device that collects data from KraussMaffei machines.
SocialProduction is a production monitoring tool. The most recent addition to the platform measures and logs energy consumption, looking for anomalies. SocialProduction alerts customers when a machine stops, an alarm is triggered or operating parameters move outside normal limits.
“Once you see that there is a certain machine with less stability in your plant, that's when you need to put your processors on it to see what's going on, or maybe replace a few things on the machine,” said Ranjith Pola, director of digital solutions and controls at KraussMaffei USA.
At present, socialProduction can pinpoint an anomaly, but in the future, the company would like to offer more advanced diagnostics.
“At the moment it will only report,” Pola said. “That's the next version we are working on, where we can correlate this anomaly to a certain cause and then give indications on where to look for it.”
Another component of socialProduction is what KraussMaffei calls liveCare, which offers continuous online monitoring of wear on machine components such as screws, and helps companies implement condition-based maintenance strategies by determining the optimum service life of components.
APCPlus is one of KraussMaffei’s most popular smart manufacturing offerings, Pola said. He compared it to “cruise control for the injection molding machine process.”
APCPlus compensates for external influences on molded part quality, such as viscosity changes, according to the company. It automatically adjusts the molding machine to achieve consistently high-quality parts. The system can also reduce material use, energy consumption and cycle time.
Another product, dataXplorer, is a high-resolution data recording and analysis tool for injection molding machines and extruders.
“With dataXplorer, you can get thousands of data points from the machine, and at higher frequency,” Pola said. “With this data, what customers can do is amazing.”
Process engineers can use the data to optimize equipment performance. While dataXplorer does not perform predictive maintenance analysis itself, it supplies the high-resolution data needed by third-party predictive maintenance software, Pola said.
KraussMaffei Corp., Florence, Ky., 859-283-0200, www.kraussmaffei.com
