Industry 4.0, IIoT, digitization, big data, AI - all these themes are front-page news in the specialist industrial press or on the Internet. But how do we actually improve productivity and profitability?
For an industrial installation, digitization is often considered from the angle of connectivity, IT, networks and protocols. However, according to Wika, to generate real profitability from digitization, we need to start from the fundamentals: the industrial application itself; its characteristics, its operation, its constraints and problems, which are most often associated with parameters monitored using measuring instruments.
This is the challenge the company is taking up with its new global IIoT monitoring offering. With 70 years' experience in industrial instrumentation, particularly in pressure, temperature and level measurement worldwide, Wika has extensive application expertise and a real aptitude for implementing an efficient digitalization strategy in coordination with an operator.
Taking, for example, the case of storage tanks and vats for fluids as diverse as fuels, liquid foodstuffs and gas, which are stored at multiple sites scattered across a territory and whose filling needs to be monitored and renewed, Wika will exploit its knowledge of these applications to offer a monitoring system enabling the operator to work very concretely on reducing costs and thus boosting profitability: through logistical optimization of rounds based on anticipated analysis of filling requirements, and through the implementation of commercial offers linked to opportunities for organizing filling rounds.
The cornerstone of the system remains the instrumentation, which provides feedback on the status and behavior of the application. Wireless instruments are by far the most advantageous solution, according to Wika: they require no battery power to operate and communicate, are extremely flexible and simple to install, and are inexpensive compared with the installation of wired instruments.
Wika is gradually launching a whole range of connected measuring instruments and/or modules. One example is the PGW23, a connected process pressure gauge that communicates using the LoRaWAN protocol. In addition to wireless transmission of pressure values, it also transmits ambient temperature values and manages freely adjustable remote alarm thresholds, all with a battery life of over five years.
In addition to instrumentation, Wika has positioned itself as a global supplier, providing operators with the ultimate information they need to optimize their processes: this involves connectivity, cloud storage of data, its exploitation and, finally, the provision of consultation tools and decision-making diagrams in the form of a visualization platform to which algorithms and, why not, artificial intelligence can be added.
Finally, in terms of communications, while Wika is part of the LoRa Alliance and a founding member of the mioty Alliance, it is entirely possible to exploit other connectivity solutions such as Bluetooth or 5G.
Wika is pinning its hopes on mioty technology, which looks set to become a must-have for digital instrumentation in the long term, not least because of its efficiency when it comes to connecting a large number of instruments on the same site.
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www.wika.fr