At the 2015 Emerson Global Users Exchange in Denver, Pete Sharpe, director of industry solutions application development at Emerson Automation Solutions, gave a presentation about the conceptual future of smart manufacturing and the roadmap to get there.
Fast forward two years to the same event this week in Minneapolis, and Sharpe delivered Part 2 of the presentation, focusing on real-world testbeds spearheaded by the Clean Energy Smart Manufacturing Innovation Institute (CESMII), which didn’t even exist when Sharpe first spoke about the subject.
CESMII is a UCLA-headquartered nonprofit organization started in 2016 with a U.S. Dept. of Energy Department (DoE) grant and manufacturer funding. It is led by the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition (SMLC). “When we talk about smart manufacturing, we’re taking sensors, wired and wireless, pulling the data up into the cloud for some additional applications and then coming out with knowledge,” explained Sharpe. “All of this is running up in the cloud. Industry is moving to the cloud, like it or not. It reduces the cost and risk of managing these systems on-premise. Bringing the data to the cloud allows subject matter experts (SMEs) and software to collaborate and make decisions.”
Cloud computing is being able to deliver applications at much lower cost, said Sharpe. “The intent is not to force you to use a platform,” explained Sharpe. “The idea is to build a marketplace where vendors can post applications. It’s a repository of systems, tools and apps for smart manufacturing. It connects manufacturers with application vendors. Applications can be customized for commercial products. And they need to be reconfigurable and reusable.”
Bring the heat
In 2013, the SMLC conducted a Praxair testbed, which was funded by a DoE grant. It brought together technologies to balance burners in a furnace and reduce waste heat. The steam-methane-reformer (SMR) furnace contained 96 burners and 400 tubes. “Higher temperature improves hydrogen yield,” said Sharpe. “These furnaces are as big as four-story houses. We added a number of infrared cameras to the tubes, and every single pixel is a temperature measurement. We picked out about 600 temperature measurements on the tubes that tell us how to adjust the 96 burners, so we can balance the heat in the furnace. One tube is affected by multiple burners, so it’s not easy to do.”
Preliminary waste-heat-reduction analysis demonstrated that Praxair was able to save 3-7% on the SMR and identified about $300,000/year in savings using this technology.
Open, CESMII
CESMII is a national network of practitioners. It enables access to technology exchanges and provides opportunities to learn from other companies and industries. Members include manufacturers, technology providers, national labs and academia, state and local governments, associations and nonprofits. “We want to double energy productivity in U.S. manufacturing every 10 years,” explained Sharpe. “We want to halve the cost of deploying smart-manufacturing systems relative to state-of-the-art in the next five years. Further, we want to increase the smart-manufacturing workforce, double the smart-manufacturing technology supply-chain value, and reduce energy use.”
Sharpe is part of the Gulf Coast Regional Manufacturing Center, which currently is in the process of identifying its own testbeds. “The goal is to propose a number of testbed projects to the region around a set of Affinity Groups,” he explained. The five Gulf Coast Affinity Groups include chemical processing, decision support/human integrations, discrete processes, polymer processes and process intensifications.
“In the Chemical Processing Affinity Group, our testbed is going to be about a digital twin,” said Sharpe. “Most people think planning, scheduling and optimization. In Emerson’s world, the digital twin is about assets, valves, controls devices, processes and plants.”
CESMII expects to make advanced technology available for small and medium-size companies. “We are still looking for more manufacturing partners. The smart-manufacturing platform provides an open marketplace for vendors,” explained Sharpe. “It promotes reusability of applications, and it shifts software, hardware and system-management risk to the vendor and cloud provider.”