FOR VELCO the launch of its cloud was a milestone on its journey towards Industry 4.0. The Germany-based company supplies pressurized vessels, rotor gunning machines and injection plants for use in blast furnaces, steelworks, foundries and the refractory industry. In order to provide rapid support for customers, Velco’s machines include a remote monitoring function. 

After its previous solution was no longer able to meet its requirements, the firm searched for a cloud-based solution that would allow worldwide remote access via PC or smartphone. Following a selection process, the company opted for Turck's cloud solution.

"We excluded the major cloud vendors because they did not offer any industry-specific solutions. Ultimately we needed a solution that could also operate in extreme environments like steelworks," said Velco electrical engineer Michael Sundmacher. 

Avoiding excessive service callouts

"The customer wants to know: whether the machine is working or not and whether or not it is operating correctly," explained Klaus Küster, head of electrical engineering at Velco. 

The remote monitoring module was designed to reduce excessive service callouts due to accidentally closed supply lines or inadvertently activated emergency pushbuttons, while at the same time helping to troubleshoot real malfunctions. 

"The key benefit is the fact that we could access the controller of the machine directly via a PC or a smartphone and even control this via Modbus. Other solutions can't offer this," Küster added.

A customer's employees can call up the dashboard of the Velco cloud and see their machines listed in the navigation window. A map in a Google Maps view indicates the location of the individual machines. 

If an employee clicks on one of the entries in the list, the dashboard provides a clear overview of all the relevant data. Alongside analog values such as water pressure or material level, there are also digital indicators which provide data on a machine’s operating state or the status of the emergency stop button. 

Simplifying trouble-shooting

The user can also see an operating hours counter and other numerical displays. The dashboard can be configured very easily by the users themselves – with just a few clicks and without the need for any programming knowledge. Users can also create their own alarm messages via SMS or email for different users.

One challenge for support employees is that many errors only occur infrequently and randomly, making trouble-shooting a time-consuming process. Turck's cloud-based solution will record relevant values over a defined period, with the system outputting the data in a CSV file.

This allows Velco’s support team to identify the location of any faults more easily. It also opens the door to using predictive maintenance algorithms via the interface. 

Ensuring peace of mind

Turck has always placed prime importance on data and communication security. Reflecting this, different authorisation levels can be defined individually for each machine and user, from elementary read rights to write authorisation, right through to administrator rights. 

Additionally, the communication between Turck's TCG20 cloud gateway and the cloud server is encrypted via the Kolibri proprietary cloud protocol, which meets the latest standard for data transport on the web (TLS 1.3, AES256).

Responsible IT managers seldom allow access to the corporate network even when it uses encryption. With the Turck solution this is not a problem since the TCG20 can also establish the connection to the cloud via the mobile network, always ensuring mobile access to the machines

Tony Coghlan is managing director at Turck Banner

For more information: 

www.turckbanner.co.uk

Tel: 01268 578888‍