Neal System’s General Manager, Shane Filer, will be a panelist on the Miller Resource Group: New Business Development and Customer Acquisition in the Post Covid-19 Era Roundtable. The roundtable webinar will be taking place on June 9, 2020 at 2PM. To register click here!
Eurotherm by Schneider Electric is a leading provider of temperature control, electric heat power control, and data acquisition solutions. Chris Mooney, Senior Sales Manager of Solutions, recently sat with Shane Filer, General Manager at Neal Systems, to discuss the ways that he has seen the traditional solutions that Eurotherm has offered now shifting artificial intelligence software.
Shane: Chris, Eurotherm is known for its data recorders, temperature controllers, and electric heat power controllers – but you spend most of your time talking about software nowadays. Why is that?
Chris: Companies are definitely shifting more and more into needing data that helps them make smart decisions, whether to compete on a broader scale, boost their quality level, or improve their efficiency. As a result, we’ve seen a massive shift within Eurotherm from selling hardware (controllers, recorders) that happen to provide data back to a software package, to selling software that happens to pull data from various hardware solutions.
Shane: Within the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT) world, that’s often called the “Applications Layer” – rather than the “Edge Control” layer that Eurotherm traditionally has existed in. What sort of applications and artificial intelligence solutions are you seeing the most need for in your traditional industries?
Chris: There are two that really stand-out. The first is Energy Management. We often are selling to companies doing some sort of heating application — plastic extrusion, or perhaps heat treating with furnaces, or boiler control, or even manufacturing of semiconductor chips. Those applications often require a lot of Water, Air, Gas, Electric, or Steam – which are often referred to by the acronym WAGES. However, many of our customers have never actually explored or recognized that by monitoring those things and optimizing them, you can actually boost production efficiency quite a bit in most cases. For instance, Schneider Electric’s Power Monitor Expert (PME) might take into account the electricity power factor as well as the actual electrical usage to provide information that allows automated decision- making to be made that just hadn’t been considered before – artificial intelligence.
Shane: What other sorts of artificial intelligence solutions are your traditional customers now able to do with some of the solutions your team is providing?
Chris: Many of our traditional customers have optimized individual production solutions, but haven’t necessarily looked at a more holistic view of the plant, its people, and the processes. We’ve been providing solutions using Schneider’s Insight Performance package, which is a derivative of the AVEVA Wonderware solutions, to help companies gather and visualize their OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) and KPI (Key Performance Indicator) data. What sort of decisions might a plastic extrusion company be able to make if they suddenly had a way to measure plant uptime vs. downtime, unplanned downtime, or even what the top 5 reasons are why their lines go down over the course of a year? What if a heat treat company could tell per furnace what sort of availability, performance and quality was consistently produced – they could make better decisions, or even automate some decisions. By helping our customers recognize what decisions could be automated by measuring different things, and how those measurements might boost things like quality, efficiency, or up-time, and then finally how those things could be automated with artificial intelligence, Eurotherm suddenly becomes much more of a business partner than just a supplier of hardware.
Shane: Thanks so much for your time, Chris – can’t wait to see what else Eurotherm has coming up!
For more information on how Eurotherm’s solutions can benefit your plant and processes, contact us here!
Neal Systems’ general manager, Shane Filer, had a chance to interview Tod Canty Sr. of JM Canty. His company is impacting the industrial world with Artificial Intelligence.
JM Canty is a leading supplier of process tank visual solutions, supplying everything from sight glasses to LED lighting to particle size analyzers to smart visual camera solutions. Shane was able to chat with Tod Canty Sr., the current president of the company, as to how artificial intelligence found a home with the Canty visual cameras.
INTERVIEW:
Shane: Tod, what initially made you realize that artificial intelligence could be applied with your camera systems?
Tod: I remember it was 1988. I was involved with a project at Dow Chemical, and my contact there wondered what could be done to replicate an operator physically looking into the tank 24 hours a day. We already had an analog camera that could digitize into pixels, and I knew that machine vision technology was already starting to be used in certain manufacturing sites. It made me wonder whether the data from the camera pixels would tell me anything. I used BASIC and assembly languages to compile data algorithms, and realized that we could actually “see” differences in data that we could use to mimic an operator’s decision making based upon things like level, color change, and other things happening in the tank. Thus the Canty Vector Control project was born.
Shane: What were some of the initial ways that you utilized that artificial intelligence with your Vector Control solution?
Tod: Two that stood out were both Foaming control and Level control. We realized that we needed better lighting in the tanks in order to be able to better “see” what was happening, and differentiate pixels from light to dark. We were able to teach the vector control device to digitize the data to recognize patterns as they changed to recognize pixel differences that corresponded to definite level and foaming effects. The Vector Control’s Artificial intelligence had to recognize not just pixel change, but also the rate of change, as well as contrasts with edges (light and shadow). We kept teaching the algorithms, but realized that we had to control the lighting AND the camera AND the software – all were critical.
Shane: What are some of the creative ways that you have seen customers teach the system that Canty hadn’t thought of?
Tod: Seeing things with clear water was easy, but agitated tanks were pretty difficult and required more algorithm training, as well as decision trees for complex problems. We also had people start to use the cameras for particle sizing, high temperature cameras for burners and pilots for thermal oxidizers, as well as looking at the levels of molten glass – things we never considered. If an operator can see something visually and know a process well enough to make decisions, we can probably use the software to teach it to make the same decisions.
Shane: Last question – any specific industries that utilized the Vector Security hardware / software to achieve process optimization such that it fundamentally changed the way that they operated the process?
Tod: One of the exciting ones is that is especially prominent right now with the whole push for the CoronaVirus Vaccine is bioreactor batches. Foaming is an issue that affects just about every industry with their agitated tanks. Some of our customers that had bioreactors utilized the Canty Foaming Camera, and reported back to us that one very unexpected positive consequence came out of it. Not only did they have a much faster response to foam as it started (meaning that less foam formed, and less anti-foam chemical had to be added and subsequently removed), but they found that they could now produce 30-50% more product per batch. They no longer had to leave so much room for the expected amount of foam that they often got, and as such were able to put more product into the tank. So they installed the camera to save on anti-foam (which they did), but the real benefit became something unexpected – the significant extra amount per batch that could be made.
Shane: Thanks so much, Tod – greatly appreciate you taking the time to walk through how artificial intelligence actually got programmed in, and excited to see what new ways that industries will utilize the Canty visual solutions!
More information on the JM Canty process cameras with artificial intelligence can be found here! If you would like to discuss your specific tank application and how these process cameras can benefit your process, please reach out to Shane at sfiler@nealsystems.com.
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