Iot Enabling of Vacuum Heat Treatment Chambers for Data Acquisition and Analytics

The Industrial Internet of Things capitalize application of sensors in getting real time data through computers, cloud servers for transformational business outcomes for Industrial applications. Some of the key benefits of Industrial Internet of Things are to reduce human errors, manual labor work, costs, time & money. We also cannot forget the possible underpinnings of IIoT in quality control and maintenance. The heat treatment industry is at turning point, in which digital technology has the capacity to unlock new ways of managing process variables and enhance productivity in vacuum heat treatment operations. Vacuum heat treatment (VHT) plays an important role in capacitor production. During the heat treatment process the zinc element has to undergo certain process within VHT chamber for strengthening the element. The temperature should be maintained and controlled in a proper proportion during capacitor production. By monitoring the live temperature, errors like temperature increase and decrease can be identified and predictive maintenance can be done. In this work, we developed a system to monitor the temperature levels in VHT especially the coolant pipe which is directed to VHT. The developed system uses pt100 sensors to monitor the live temperature of the coolant pipe through a gateway using the PLC. This overall process is done in real time at Schneider Electric, Bangalore. The time taken to complete one process takes 72 hours. The temperature values collected during the process is stored in database created using MySql and then transferred to cloud for analysis to do predictive maintenances.