You can check on your kids, your thermostat, or the contents of your refrigerator from thousands of miles away—why wouldn’t you want to see how the conveyor systems at your plant are running? Thanks to new cloud-based monitoring technology from NORD Drivesystems, NORD has investigated possibilities how to transmit data out of the drive into the Cloud without having to adapt or change the installation or software. For the past year, engineers worked on a Cloud installation at an internal application test center at Bargteheide (NORD Headquarters) where the NORD drives are tested and demonstrated to customers. It’s called NORD Cloud, and after extensive validation in the application test center, the mechanical and electronic drive component provider is now ready to show the installation and to discuss the possibilities in regards to digitization with the customers.
它是如何工作的？NORD的电子产品经理说，该公司的15个调查器测试系统配备了Nordac Flex和Nordac Link AC矢量驱动器，这些驱动器通过工业以太网连接（PROFINET）与系统plc链接。然后，通过网络网关将安全隧道配置为远程，基于云的服务器。这导致几乎连续地将驱动器数据从PLC连续流到同一服务器上的网站，从而使电压，电流，频率，温度以及错误消息和警报等值的收集和分析。可以将系统配置为带有常规状态更新的电子邮件和短信，或者在失败时警报人员。
产品经理说：“因为我们在公交系统运行的同一周期内发送数据，所以很容易识别趋势。”“可能会增加电压增加或温度变化，如果不是该系统，则可能未被发现，并且在某些时候会导致设备故障。NORD Cloud使我们和我们的客户在预防性维护活动上更加主动，并为持续改进提供了无数的机会，例如减少能源使用情况，或改善关键组件的磨损特性。”
Customers can visit the NORD application test center for a live demonstration, to discuss potential applications with NORD experts, and share their own experiences. NORD stays close to its customers and we want to understand requirements towards digitization. NORD consults their customers to bring the condition data of the drive into the Cloud more easily without adapting the drive configuration or software.
For those concerned over network congestion caused by streaming large amounts of data, only the values that have changed since the last transmission are sent. The amount, frequency, and types of data collected by the system can easily be adjusted through modification of parameter changes in the IoT gateway. Also, since status updates carry a lower priority than system control commands, there’s no risk of overburdening either the PLC or the Profinet bus. Says director of marketing Joerg Niermann, “We at NORD look forward to working with customers that want to make their operations more efficient,” he says. “The ability to more easily analyze the data coming from our systems will be an advantage for them in that they will have instant access to their equipment status from anywhere in the world while NORD will ultimately gain additional opportunities for product improvement. It’s a win-win for all of us.”
