GET SMART
THE FACTORIES OF THE FUTURE Lauren Davis
With a new year comes new hope for the promises of Smart Industry — a phenomenon that is revolutionising manufacturing in ways we could previously only dream of. To learn more about this trend, What’s New in Electronics spoke with Sapna Mongia, Head – Smart Grids and Metering, South Asia, Power and Discretes, from semiconductor supplier STMicroelectronics (ST).
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mart Industry, Industry 4.0, the Fourth Industrial Revolution… what exactly is this thing that has the world’s engineers so excited? Mongia defines Smart Industry as “the vast deployment of sensors, actuators and processing capabilities, together with the collection and analysis of the data they produce, to monitor and report on the critical points in industrial environments, to increase efficiency, reduce costs and move from preventive to predictive maintenance”. She added that it encompasses a number of key trends, including: • next levels of automation with distributed control; • safer working environments and new man-machine interaction models; • higher energy efficiency for industrial machinery; • the capture and use of manufacturing data; • the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Smart Industry includes high-growth application areas such as factory automation, industrial robots and industrial lighting,
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according to Mongia — areas which ST is well acquainted with through its large range of motor control ICs, industrial analog ASICs, sensors, actuators and microcontrollers. Applications include building control, manufacturing and process automation, medical electronics, military and civil aerospace, test and measurement, power and energy, security and video surveillance, and industrial 3D printers. One of the key benefits of Smart Industry is improved factory automation, with Mongia stating, “Initiatives such as Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are defining the next phase in the digitisation of the manufacturing sector towards better efficiency, flexibility and safety. “Smart, aware machines are creating new ways for man and machine to interact in the factory,” she added. Furthermore, with improved factory automation comes improved power management — a particularly important development as, according to Mongia, “The industrial sector uses over 50% of the
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