SMART motor for industry 4.0

With the world moving towards the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) there is a need for technologies that align with the customer expectation of making their plants more intelligent and communicative in a wireless manner. The currently trending concept of Industry 4.0 introduces what has been called the “smart factory,” in which cyber-physical systems monitor the physical processes of the factory and make decentralized decisions. The physical systems become Internet of Things, communicating and cooperating both with each other and with humans in real time via the wireless web. The paper introduces SMART Electric Motors, the future of Electric Motors. A SMART Motor can perform its own condition monitoring, 24×7, and predicts failures much in advance, which allows corrective actions to be taken to avoid premature equipment & process breakdowns in the industry. SMART motors coupled with various equipment also act as a pattern learning device to gather the, much needed, hidden, equipment productivity and efficiency related information. This information can be a very useful MIS data to improve the productivity, efficiency and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) for the industry.

I. Introduction

Electric motors are the workhorses of the industries. Electric motors have been the prime drivers in industry for decades and shall probably remain so for several years in future. Today, almost 45%of global electricity generated and 70% of total industrial electricity consumed is by Electric motors. The breakdown of Electric Motors leads to large amount of financial, production and reputational losses to the industry. Also, electric motors being prime movers of almost all dynamic machinery in industry, a large amount of productivity and efficiency data can be generated from them, which is currently untapped.