Networked Electric Drives in the Industry 4.0

Abstract

Industrial automation has been recently challenged by new initiatives such as Industry 4.0, which promises higher connectivity between the devices in an industrial plant. The goal of this work is to discuss how electric drives, widely employed in industry, could benefit from this increased connectivity. Specific applications, such as condition monitoring and multidrive systems, are considered to show the advantages of the industrial network presence, combined with the introduction of new data driven methods. Moreover, the status of industrial communication technologies is depicted, and their suitability for condition monitoring and multi-drive systems applications is described.

Bulk data transfer in Controller Area Networks for Industry 4.0

“…For the numerical example we consider the use case of electric drive condition monitoring [14], with N = 6 or 10 nodes, N b = 20 packets of bulk data to transmit, and an equal transmission time for both the control messages and the bulk data, C m = C b = 0.2 ms. The transmission interval of the control messages is the same for all the nodes and is tuned such that a given load ρ is achieved on the CAN bus.…”

“…electric vehicles). Classical condition monitoring methods are based on motor current signature analysis [12], while recently various diagnostic solutions based on high-frequency current sampling (or oversampling) have been proposed [13], [14]. The effectiveness of condition monitoring methods depends on a comparison between current measurements and an initial reference measurement performed when the electric drive was supposedly healthy [12].…”

Multi-drive control and condition monitoring in networked electric drives with EtherCAT

“…As mentioned in Section I and detailed in [6], multi-drives systems can benefit from a collaborative network of electric drives. The collaboration implies that reference signals for each drives are generated by taking the state of all the other drives into account.…”

“…In multi-drive systems, for example, for conveyor belts or for tandem-connected motors, different frequency converters share the same DC bus while the operation of the electric motors aims for a common goal. In these industrial plants, the total losses can be decreased with a cooperative dynamic load sharing strategy between the electric drives [6]. The cooperative strategy is inevitably based on an increased exchange of information within the multi-drive system and thus further traffic in the industrial network.…”

“…An initial study about how CM and multi-drive systems benefit from an increased connectivity of electric drives has been presented in [6]. The objective of this paper is to provide a quantitative evaluation of how these two applications, with very different service requirements could be served by the same network.…”