Electricity + Control December 2020

INDUSTRY 4.0 + IIOT : PRODUCTS + SERVICES

Enabling IT/OT convergence for industry value

Digitalising minerals processing The mining industry’s accelerated move towards digital solutions since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic is supported by FLSmidth with solutions that result from its long-established research and development focus. Terence Osborn, FLSmidth Director of Product and Account Management for sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, highlights that R&D is the lifeblood of the company’s new technologies. It currently has some 80 projects underway to improve its mining-related offerings. To simplify and accelerate IT/OT convergence, Rockwell Automation has introduced Factory Talk ® Edge Gateway™, the first capability of its edge strategy. Many industrial enterprises struggle to aggregate operational data from heterogeneous sources and add relevant context from the source – such as process conditions, time stamps, machine states and other production states – to the IT layer. This prevents them from uncovering potentially valuable insights at the enterprise level. While traditional gateway solutions fail to address these challenges, FactoryTalk Edge Gateway enriches OT data with critical context where it matters – at the edge – and delivers it in a flexible, common information model to IT applications. This enables industrial enterprises to derive operational insights for a competitive edge. FactoryTalk Edge Gateway is the foundation of a broader edge platform that will include elements of pre- built data analytics models, machine learning, tailored applications, and scalable computing. It is the latest addition to the widely adopted FactoryTalk ® Analytics suite that serves diverse industries and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) use cases. It is also a key element in Rockwell Automation’s strategy to accelerate digital agility across industrial devices to cloud spectrum, with partnerships including PTC and Microsoft. Today, many industrial facilities use heterogeneous systems and devices that generate volumes of data at high

speeds – resulting in significant data silos. Connecting the dots across these data silos by building relevant OT context is key to generating higher value actionable insights. Furthermore, unless the industrial OT data is packaged into a logical data model that both IT and OT applications can understand, IT/OT convergence remains a farfetched prospect. FactoryTalk Edge Gateway automatically stitches the data together and packages it using a pre-configured information model hierarchy. It provides one solution to collect and organise the relevant data. The system’s data management capabilities reduce analytics data preparation efforts for data scientists or analysts by up to 70%, and provide high value OT data. The underlying common information data model FactoryTalk Edge Gateway collates the operational data and packages it into a logical model that IT and OT applications can understand. “Thepower of digital technology iscertainlyakeyelement of these efforts,” says Osborn. “Together with our Blue Box digital concept, based on our ECS/ControlCenter™, which is a cybersecure interface between our equipment and cloud data storage, we use our SiteConnect™ mobile app to monitor the performance of equipment and process plants in real time. The ECS/ControlCenter™ V8 process control platform sits at the heart of our digital vision, a key component in our growing portfolio of digital solutions and services that we call ENABLR.” An example of this applied capability is an FLSmidth REFLUX ® Classifier modular plant operating on a South African mine. Using SiteConnect, operations managers have real-time access to over a hundred operational parameters on the plant. Data analytics linked to the cloud data can also generate time-based trends for instant viewing on the app. Osborn adds, “We have developed SmartCyclone™ technology for our hydrocyclones. This innovation uses sensors to detect wear and roping, a condition that reduc- es separation efficiency. By sending an alert when certain operating parameters are breached, the system ensures optimal efficiency is maintained, even as slurry conditions in the circuit vary.” He highlights that the company’s machine-level solutions are offered as part of plant and process

FLSmidth’s SiteConnect™ app can visualise the performance of equipment and process plants in real time on any smart device.

6 Electricity + Control DECEMBER 2020