Distributed condition monitoring systems in electric drives manufacturing

In industrial manufacturing, high system availability is the most effective lever for increasing productivity. For minimal downtimes, it is important to identify sources of errors at an early stage in order to perform scheduled maintenance. Especially in the field of electric drives manufacturing, the thermo-crimping process is one major technology to join insulated copper wires with belonging current carrying parts. However, due to its operating principle, this technology has to be associated with strong disadvantages. Primarily, the excessive tool abrasion leads to immoderate, difficult to plan maintenance operations. In order to address these challenges, this paper introduces a generic condition monitoring system, which is the enabler for predictive maintenance and online product quality monitoring in this area. By recognizing variations in energy consumption and process temperature, it is possible to determine the wear margin of electrodes and the joint quality during operation. According to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the implementation relies on the communication standard Open Platform Communications Unified Architecture (OPC UA). Finally, verification and validation are performed in a case study.