The multitude of software applications often requires the handling of information in different data formats. It is not uncommon for information to be lost in the process, which is why PIC 4.0 is researching methods for implementing continuous simulation chains.

Stages of an exemplary product development process for a load-balanced saddle equipped with different tapes

16:9

Part 6 of the Series: How a Web-Based Interface Supports Data-Handling

Digitale Transformation

Wirtschaft

Innovationen und neue Technologie

Simulation

Software

Spritzgießsimulation

Industrie 4.0 für die Kunststoffverarbeitung

Industrie 4.0

Virtual Reality für die Qualitätssicherung

Industrie 4.0 für die Qualitätssicherung

User-Friendly Data-Exchange in the Digital Engineering

In an online survey, representatives of the plastics industry formulated their expectations toward the Plastics Innovation Center 4.0 (PIC 4.0).

Wordcloud generated from the answers to the open question concerning the most important use cases for PIC 4.0

Part 5 of the Series: Practical Demonstrators for the Plastics Innovation Center 4.0

Spritzgießen

Kunststoffverarbeitung: Verfahren

Messdatenerfassung und -verarbeitung

Steuern, Regeln

Prozessoptimierung

Prozessmanagement

Machine Learning

Datenanalyse

Automatisierungstechnik

Kunststoff-Rezyklat

Kunststoff Werkstoffe

Focus on the User Benefit

M-Hub is the first mobile App that helps entrepreneurs to promote their business and find all players in the plastic industry with the tap of a finger.

M-Hub was launched at the K-show 2019. One year after, the app has reached more than 8000 professionals and 1500 companies from more than 80 countries.

The Plastic Industry in Your Hand

Part 2 of the series on the Plastics Innovation Center 4.0 (PIC 4.0) at RWTH Aachen describes the procedure by which industrial use cases of a Smart Factory are identified and converted into real testbeds within the PIC 4.0.

The PIC 4.0 extends the infrastructure of the Institute for Plastics Processing in Industry and Craft at RWTH Aachen University

PIC 4.0 Elaborates Holistic Solutions for Industrial Demands

Use Cases of Digitized Plastics Processing

Maintaining competitiveness while producing in Germany requires not only cost-efficient production, but also high-quality products. Vorwerk Elektrowerke is accepting this challenge. In collaboration with the Institute of Product Engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, the company is testing a 100 % inline quality monitoring system as well as a quality prediction using machine learning.

Customers who choose the Kobold VK 200 vacuum cleaner expect top quality. To ensure this, efforts for the introduction of Industry 4.0 measures are taken in the production plant in Wuppertal, Germany

Successfully Managing Digital Transformation with Automation and Artificial Intelligence

Künstliche Intelligenz für die Qualitätssicherung

Mehrkomponenten-Spritzgießen

Kameras, intelligente

Fertigungsautomation

Bildverarbeitung

Machine Learning / Künstliche Intelligenz für die spanende Fertigung

Industrie 4.0 für die spanende Fertigung

Inline- / Online-Messsysteme

Qualitätssicherung

Qualitätssicherung Kunststoff

Inline Quality Monitoring and  Data-Based Quality Prediction

Because it has not yet been possible to exploit the full potential of digitization in plastics processing, the Institute for Plastics Processing at RWTH Aachen University is building a new application-oriented research infrastructure along the lines of a Smart Factory. Kunststoffe is accompanying the building of the Plastics Innovation Center 4.0 with a series of publications. Part 1 describes the concept and the initial demands on the physical infrastructure.

Visionary overall picture of the expanded IKV in future, supplemented by the Plastics Innovation Center 4.0

The Plastics Innovation Center 4.0 Is under Construction at the Campus Melaten in Aachen, Germany

Smart Factory

Energieeffizienz

Kunststoffverarbeitung: Maschinen und Komponenten

Central Hub for Digitization  in Plastics Processing

Munich-based mechanical engineering group KraussMaffei is repositioning itself and uniting all divisions under a single brand. At a time of accelerated technological change, the company is increasing its efforts to develop new products for digital solutions and new business models – and that includes plastics recycling.

Everything remains different: Dr. Frank Stieler, CEO of KraussMaffei

KraussMaffei Consolidates Three Divisions and the Previous Group Brands under a Single Brand

Extrusion

Doriat, Clemens, Dr.

Spritzgießmaschinen, allgemein

Spritzgießmaschinen

Nachhaltigkeit

Umweltmanagement

Kunststoff-Recycling

Kunststoff-Aufbereitung

Ressourcenmanagement

Produktion

Compoundieren

Moving with the Times

A consistent flow of data and information is essential for digital solutions and meaningful analytics. The introduction of potential solutions is therefore often associated with high costs for data preparation.

Exemplary information flow across several steps of the value creation process in injection molding(Work-Center-Layer)

Standardization Guarantees High Data Quality for Future Applications

Vernetzung / Cloudlösung für die Kunststoffverarbeitung

IoT-Plattformen für die Kunststoffverarbeitung

To Get the Information Flow in a Row

The cluster of excellence “Internet of Production” at the RWTH Aachen University conducts research on structures to realize a “Google of Production”. The Plastics Innovation Center 4.0 serves as demonstration platform to present real-world solutions to the industry already today.

The Plastics Innovation Center 4.0 as part of  a network of research facilities at the Campus Melaten, Aachen, focused to production technology

IKV Offers an Application-Oriented Demonstration Platform for Excellent Research

The PIC 4.0 as Part of the Internet  of Production

Corona is also driving digitization in the used machinery trading. The global second-hand market for metal and plastics processing machinery is undergoing structural change.

The Gindumac Group focuses on global online trading with used machines.

Kunststoffverarbeitungsmaschinen

Gebrauchtmaschinenhandel

Dienstleistungen

Dienstleistungen in der Metallbearbeitung

Gebrauchtmaschinen

Sondermaschinen

Unternehmen

kunststoffe.de

Online Trading with Used Machines Booms in Corona Times

With the help of the coupling station, fast material changes become normal practice, material sources such as dryers, roller containers or external silos can be used by several consumers, and RFID monitoring ensures a faultless production process.

RFID antennas and tags on every coupling make sure that correct connections are established in every case between material feeding pipelines and processing machines

Kunststoffverarbeitung allgemein

Kunststoffverarbeitung

Materialhandling

Betriebstechnik für Kunststoffverarbeitung (Peripherie)

Material Distribution Monitoring

Over past months, many in-house workflows and development processes have slowed down and also changed. Nevertheless, time has not stood still, also not in injection molding technology. The debate and development have been shaped by two themes: digitalization and the circular economy. Below are some examples of developments and projects that underpin this trend.

Two displays are seamlessly integrated into the continuously 3D-formed instrument panel

Innovative Injection Molding in Times of Pandemic

Schaumspritzgießen

Folientechnik (IMD, IML, FIM, u.a.)

Spritzgießwerkzeuge

Werkzeuge für die Kunststoffverarbeitung

Biokunststoffe

Spritzgieß-Sonderverfahren

Schnecken und Plastifiziersysteme

Lasermarkieren

Oberflächentechnik

Laserbearbeitungen

Kreislaufwirtschaft

There Is More beyond the Horizon

Guido Frohnhaus has been Managing Director Technology & Engineering at Arburg for a good two years now. The pandemic restrictions meant that he has made very few appearances outside the company so far, but, as he says himself, he spent the time getting to know the in-house processes at all levels and in great detail. In this interview with Kunststoffe, the 52-year-old talks about the course he plans to set and how crucial the high level of in-house manufacturing and programming expertise is for the company’s independence.

“Gestica Will Be the Fixed Star in the Customer’s Universe”

The digital shadow is the core concept of the Cluster of Excellence “Internet of Production” at RWTH Aachen University. It represents the data trace of an asset to describe its real behavior. In the Plastics Innovation Center 4.0 (PIC 4.0), digital shadows, e.g. the data trace of a sensor, are used to optimize processes taking into account real behavior and to determine simulation quality.

The construction of the PIC 4.0 proceeds and throws its shadow on the Campus Melaten.

Part 7 of the Series: How the Digital Shadow Enlightens Real Processes in the PIC 4.0

Sensorik für Kunststoff-Verarbeitungsmaschinen

Digitaler Zwilling

Out of the Shadow into the Light

 At KraussMaffei’s booth, automotive door modules are produced from former caps of insulin pens. The system supplier is presenting not only the machine hardware necessary for this but also new digital solutions.

Digital solutions are an essential component of the material loop from the insulin pen cap to the car door module.

Messe K-Kunststoffmesse

kunststoffe-international.com

Medizinprodukte

Medizintechnik

From the Insulin Pen Cap to the Automotive Door Module

Adaptable Structures for  More Innovation

Part 8 of the PIC 4.0 Series: Flexible Infrastructures Facilitate Access to Innovative Services

Innovation management affects many areas, which now increasingly include digital services in addition to classic product and process innovation. Beyond the continuous reassessment of technical setups, a platform is being established for the consistent provision and further development of software services and dedicated analysis algorithms. Thereby, services are being provided to generate new ideas from the application and to facilitate the transfer of technology into industrial practice.

The adaptability of a company and its departments is an increasingly important characteristic for economic success. Megatrends such as digitalization and global competition mean that companies have to react ever more quickly to customer demand and implement new developments in a shorter time. Rigid structures both in the handling of business processes and in the organization of production directly or indirectly hinder the ability to react adequately and to maintain a short time-to-market for new developments [1–3].

As construction work progresses and the outer shell of the Plastics Innovation Center 4.0 (PIC 4.0, Title figure) completes, the focus is shifting to the development of production cells and processes in the subsequent active operation in the technology center. Analogous to the challenges in industry, flexible structures are also needed in research in order to be able to conduct publicly funded or bilateral research projects with industrial partners. Megatrends and challenges in industry also influence research institutes insofar as new research potentials arise and a multitude of heterogeneous inquiries arise that explore possible forms of support in industrial product and process development. Frequently, a simple recombination of existing resources (technology management), for example by linking available machine and plant technology, is not sufficient to address current issues. Instead, new developments and findings must be consistently transferred into demonstrators in order to generate ideas for transfer projects.

In the industrial context, innovation management mostly refers to the management of new developments up to entrepreneurial success on the sales market [4]. On the research side, an innovation can be understood according to a general systems-engineering definition as a renewal of structures and processes that represents an advanced solution to a problem and has a sustainable benefit [5]. This concerns the cost-efficient realization of testbeds and the institute-wide provision of software solutions and algorithms developed in numerous research projects. Targeted innovation management thus promotes technology transfer, the development of new ideas and the identification of challenges in industrial practice.

Demonstrator Processes Get Organized as Testbeds

Machines and plants are often already planned and delivered as so-called turnkey manufacturing cells. Analogous to industrial order processing, the PIC 4.0 therefore also plans research units in the form of the topic-specific testbeds [6]. When planning project-specific trials to support a research hypothesis, a test cell should therefore always be assigned to a research area and a research question within PIC 4.0 and tracked in master data management. If a new research project is being processed, the persons involved can directly check whether the relevant research questions can be processed in an existing testbed or whether new testbeds have to be designed and set up.

In order to evaluate the testbeds and the digital solutions implemented, key figures will be developed within the framework of PIC 4.0 which, on the one hand, classify the scientific relevance of the testbed and, on the other hand, allow conclusions to be drawn about the industrial application potential of the solution. The establishment of an expert panel that represents a good cross-section of the plastics processing industry, for example by including industry members of the IKV’s sponsors association, will be important for objective evaluation. Current developments in the industry and technology trends are thus identified at an early stage and can be taken into account directly when setting up a testbed and evaluating embedded digital services.

Institute-Wide Service Platform Provides Software Modules

A platform based on open-source technologies was set up for the institute-wide provision of digital services. The core of the platform is the structural concept for data acquisition already developed in the Cluster of Excellence “Internet of Production”. For this purpose, data from the machines and systems available at the institute are queried via software modules and sent to a message broker [7]. Based on the topic, the message broker assigns the incoming data packages to the systems waiting for the data, such as a database for permanent storage, a monitoring system for direct visualization or a data-driven optimization algorithm. A simplified flowchart of a data analysis shows how data is entered or read in the frontend, which can then be efficiently processed in the backend using dedicated Python algorithms, for example (Fig. 1).

The starting point for the service-platform known as “ikv services” is the Angular web development framework, via which data packages entered or read-in by the user are sent to the Kafka message broker after connection to a gateway. This allocates incoming data packages to the evaluation algorithms and returns the corresponding results as a response until they can be output and visualized in the frontend, analogously to the services of data acquisition.

The advantage of the structure described lies in its modularity and the associated possibility for scaling and expansion. Further project-specific solutions developed in the numerous research projects of the institute can thus be easily added to the service platform and made available within the network. All that is required is to set up a frontend module in the form of an Angular component and its frontend services that is suitable for the application and the respective research project and is used to input and output data packages.

In the backend, the evaluation algorithms required for the research activities can be developed and updated independently of this. For communication between the front-end module and the potentially numerous and also variable evaluation algorithms, the gateway and the message broker retain their functionality. It is thus conceivable that analyses in Labview or Matlab as well as algorithms in other programming languages also wait for incoming data packages and return results after the analysis. Through the integration with the message broker, a connection with various data sources such as real plants or other message brokers such as MQTT is possible. This is achieved via logically separated modules.

Accelerated Benefit in  Industrial Practice

An example of such a software module is shown in Figure 2. The central research question was to find out what geometric adjustment would be necessary for a plastic component to warp into the appropriate target geometry due to shrinkage and warpage. To do this, a simulation had to determine in several iteration steps what warpage to expect in order to modify the initial geometry accordingly.

In PIC 4.0, the evaluation algorithm and the service for data exchange between different simulation systems were transferred into a web application [8], which can now be made available as one of many modules in the service platform and thus institute-wide for the processing of further projects at the IKV. In this way, these and other (micro) services from research projects can also be made available to industrial partners in the future.

A further simplification in the implementation of additional services and software modules is the delivery as containers, with the help of which individual applications can be transported and installed together with all the necessary background programs and libraries. This also enables a sustainable technology transfer of services available at the institute and successively developed into a robust solution into the production environment of a company. Structured innovation management ensures consistent versioning and guarantees rapid added value in industrial practice.

[1] N. N.: Fortschreibung der Anwendungsszenarien der Plattform Industrie 4.0. Ergebnispapier: Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie (BMWi), Berlin 2016

[2] N. N.: Industrie 4.0 gestalten: Wegweisend. Vernetzt. Praxisnah. Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie (BMWi), Fortschrittsbericht Plattform Industrie 4.0, 2017–04

[3] Steegmüller, D.; Zürn, M.: Wandlungsfähige Produktionssysteme für den Automobilbau der Zukunft. In: Vogel-Heuser, B.; Bauernhansl, T.; Hompel, M. ten (Hrsg.): Handbuch Industrie 4.0 – Bd. 1: Produktion. Springer Vieweg, Berlin 2017, pp. 27–44

[4] Higgins, J. M.; Wiese, G. G.: Innovationsmanagement. Kreativitätstechniken für den unternehmerischen Erfolg. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, 1996 – ISBN: 978–3–642–61431–6

[5] Spur, G.: Innovation als Begriff. ZWF Zeitschrift für wirtschaftlichen Fabrikbetrieb 106 (2011) 3, p. 181

[6] Hopmann, C.; Bibow, P.: Use Cases of Digitized Plastics Processing. Kunststoffe International (2020) 7, pp. 6–8

[7] Hopmann, C.; Schmitz, M.; Bibow, P.: The PIC 4.0 as Part of the Internet of Production. Kunststoffe International (2021) 2, pp. 7–9

[8] Hopmann, C.; Bibow, P.; Liu, B.: User-Friendly Data-Exchange in the Digital Engineering. How a Web-Based Interface Supports Data-Handling. Kunststoffe International (2021) 7, pp. 6–9

Ausgabenartikel

Fig. 1. Various open source technologies enable the development of a scalable service platform.

Fig. 2. The software service shows a deviation of the warpage optimized part geometry compared to the target dimensions.

The outer skin of the PIC 4.0 is closing, inside the design of the demonstration cells is in full swing.

Name - Hauptartikel

Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christian Hopmann has held the Chair of Plastics Processing as Head of the Institute for Plastics Processing (IVK) in Industry and Craft at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, since 2011.

Pascal Bibow, M.Sc. RWTH, has been working since September 2016 on intelligent production systems at IKV. Since January 2020, he has been Managing Director of the Plastics Innovation Center 4.0;

<a href="mailto:pascal.bibow@ikv.rwth-aachen.de">pascal.bibow@ikv.rwth-aachen.de</a>

Lukas Seifert, M.Sc. RWTH, has been working since August 2021 on data-based quality control in extrusion processes and on digital service infrastructures at IKV.

Ben Liu, M.Sc. RWTH, has been working since April 2019 on research questions of automated data-exchange and applications in digital engineering in injection molding at IKV.

The construction of the Plastics Innovation Center 4.0 is funded by the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

The following article describes how test planning and analysis can be facilitated by a digital infrastructure and how test data can be consistently tracked in PIC 4.0. It appears in one of the next issues.