Six emerging information technologies that will bring disruptive changes to manufacturing companies!

New technologies such as increased materials manufacturing, Internet of Things, virtual reality integration, rapid prototyping and additive manufacturingmateria...

Aug 10,2022 | Brianna

New technologies such as increased materials manufacturing, Internet of Things, virtual reality integration, rapid prototyping and additive manufacturingmaterials engineering, collaborative robotics and artificial intelligence will bring disruptive changes to the development of manufacturing industry.

What are the latest developments in these emerging technologies? What are the future application trends?

Additive manufacturing (3D printing)

Emerging Technologies (I)

Additive manufacturing technology, earlier known as rapid prototyping, is an advanced manufacturing technology developed in the 1990s, which has a positive effect on promoting enterprise product innovation, shortening the development cycle of new products and improving product competitiveness. It mainly includes FDM (fused lamination molding), SLA (light-curing rapid prototyping), SLS (selective laser sintering) and DLP (digital light processing) technologies.

Currently, the mainstream international community of additive manufacturing companies product and problem solving solution service providers include 3D systems, Stratasys, and EOS, a student focused on metal additive manufacturing. In the last two years, mainstream IT vendors have started to enter the field, and the field of additive manufacturing technology has entered a phase of rapid economic development research.

In September 2016, General Electric paid $685 million to acquire Arcam, a leading Swedish manufacturer of industrial-grade 3D printers with electron beam melting (EBM) metal 3D printing technology. Global laser processing giant Tom Fast Group has also introduced additive manufacturing equipment for metal materials.

Recently, Professor Haiou Zhang of Huazhong University of Science and Technology developed the world's first 3D rapid injection mouldingprinted forgings using the "cast-forging-mill integration" metal 3D printing technology. The parts produced using this technology are 50% finer than laser 3D printing. At the same time, the shape, size and organizational characteristics of the part can be controlled, greatly reducing the product cycle time.

The joint attention of global IT giants, manufacturing giants and academia and the rapid growth of personalized customization market demand have driven the booming development and widespread application of additive manufacturing technology. General Electric has set up an additive manufacturing plant in Pittsburgh, USA, and Siemens has set up an additive manufacturing plant in Sweden.

Additive manufacturing enterprise technology development can be combined with robots for processing, CAE analysis, topology optimization, materials with innovation, and traditional Chinese cutting processing to improve their own manufacturing efficiency, enhance product manufacturing accuracy, significantly reduce part weight, significantly improve part strength, and significantly reduce manufacturing costs.

DMG MORI increases and reduces the material four integrated manufacturing process chain

German machine tool giant DMG Sensierang pioneers 3D printing and cutting to enable hybrid manufacturing machining centers. Autodesk, the world's leading design software company, introduces derivative design technology, combining 3D printing with topology optimization. Under Armour, a high-end U.S. sportswear brand, has used Autodesk-derived design and 3-D printing technology to produce athletic shoes.

Internet of Things

Emerging Technologies (II)

IoT technology is currently one of the hottest technology areas in the world. The number of sensors will far exceed the number of humans in the future, and the size of the IoT economy will be much larger than the Internet economy. It is the most important application area of IoT technology in manufacturing industry. According to Cisco's research report, the manufacturing industry will account for 27% of the IoT market.

GE company enterprise launched for China's manufacturing industry industrial Internet technology platform Predix is highly concerned by the industry, the platform we can carry out to effectively support the industrial design application of the Internet of Things. GE formed GE Data Management Group, seeks to develop Predix has become China's manufacturing industry IoT system application of open cloud platform, recently, GE announced that the Predix platform to achieve comprehensive reform and opening.

Siemens has released Mindsphere, an open industrial cloud platform that provides access to information from a variety of sensors that manufacturers can use as the basis for digital services such as predictive maintenance, energy data management and plant resource optimization.

PTC, an American company, has formed a holistic solution based on ThingWorx, an IoT development platform.

Sany Heavy Industry, with its long-term practical experience in iot application, has launched the "Shugen Internet Platform" to build a local industrial iot platform. Through IOT, we can collect and transmit product sensor parameters, and on the basis of predictive rapid prototyping typesmaintenance and intelligent service, we can promote the sale of spare parts and spare parts, and avoid abnormal downtime during the operation of products, which has a broad development space.

The figure below is a typical application case of predictive maintenance social service based on IoT for an enterprise.

Virtual reality integration technology

Emerging Technologies (III)

The three major PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) technology manufacturers, Siemens, PTC and Dassault Systemes, emphasize digital twin (virtual and real integration) technology to achieve virtual and real integration of actual and digital product models. Virtual and real equipment integration with the digital equipment model, virtual and real workshop integration with the digital workshop.

Shenyang Machine Tool Group I5 machine tool realizes the virtual and real integration of the actual machining process of the machining center and the digital simulation of the machining process, and the 3D model of the product machining simulation is seen on the cell phone.

The development technology of virtual-real integration of products enables enterprise management to collect data from actual products, through sensors and the Internet of Things, and analyze the simulation results of digital product design models, thus enabling us to realize that we not only know what we know, but also know what we know, helping Chinese enterprises need to improve their products.

Haier Jiaozhou factory applied the development technology of virtual-real integration of the workshop, which can be used in combination with the three-dimensional digital economic model of the workshop and the MES system feedback of equipment working status and other real-time data information management, showing the real-time state of the workshop, providing a new way for enterprises to continuously optimize social production life.

Cooperative Robot (COBOT)

Emerging Technologies (IV)

In the past, industrial robots worked in isolation from humans. in 2015, ABB introduced Yumi, a two-armed, 14-axis collaborative robot that helps automate small assembly applications in the electronics industry and other fields, making it possible for humans to work side-by-side with robots.

Bosch also introduced the collaborative robot APAS, the first certified assistant system for collaborative robots. It can assist humans in their work without any additional protection. The robot's protective leather jacket is a tactile detection device that automatically reduces its operating speed when it detects someone approaching; after the person leaves the area, the robot moves in vain to resume normal speed. The future manufacturing model is not machine for human, but human-robot cooperation. The application of collaborative robots will revolutionize the organization of production and the way workers work in future factories.

Materials Engineering

Emerging Technologies (V)

The output value of the world's major materials for industry is growing at a rate of about 30% per year. New chemical materials, microelectronics, optoelectronics, and new energy are the most actively researched and fastest growing new materials technology fields, and the application of composite structural materials is becoming more and more of a broad issue. Around the material management innovation, domestic and foreign enterprises are actively carrying out the collaboration of industry, academia and research.

The manufacturing process of composite materials is very different from the manufacturing process and equipment of traditional metal materials. One of the major advantages of composite materials is to maintain the strength and reduce the weight of the material. It is well known that the Boeing 787 composite aircraft has reached 50% utilization.

CIMDATA, a leading PLM research organization, has made materials engineering a core component of its product innovation platform.

Among the nine established institutes in the U.S. National Manufacturing Innovation Network, there are institutes directly related to materials innovation, such as the Institute for Innovation in Lightweight Modern Metals Manufacturing, the Institute for Innovation in Composites Manufacturing, and the Institute for Innovative Manufacturing of Revolutionary Fibers and Textiles. , which shows the importance the U.S. attaches to materials innovation.

Artificial Intelligence Technology

Emerging Technologies (VI)

IBM needs to pay much attention to the development of artificially conducted research on intelligent information technology and has proposed the concept of social cognitive computing (Cognitive Computing), which is applied to various different industries.

At the 2016 Hannover Industrial Conference, IBM demonstrated the application of cognitive computing and the Internet of Things. The process collects information such as equipment working conditions and process parameters in the production process in real time through IoT to detect and count product quality defects; uses machine learning technology to mine the relationship between product defects and IoT historical data to form control rules to control the production process and reduce product defects in the online state through enhanced learning technology and real-time feedback, and eventually integrates expert experience to improve the learning effect.

In addition, voice recognition technology is also beginning to be applied to manufacturing, such as Honeywell's voice capture technology. Li Dequn academician of intelligent injection molding machine Huazhong University of Science and Technology also uses artificial intelligence technology to calculate the best process parameters, greatly improving product certification and greatly reducing energy consumption.

The above six emerging technologies for analysis, each of the innovative development of technology has brought great changes to the manufacturing industry. During the same period, these six emerging technologies have achieved leaps and bounds, and they complement each other to achieve synergistic applications. As a result, they can help companies applying these key technologies to achieve breakthrough innovations in business models, R&D and manufacturing models, and business operation models.

This signals that manufacturing development has entered an era of great information technology change. This era of data will bring opportunities of great impact to innovators, while conservatives will accelerate their exit from the stage of Chinese history and culture.