Page 72 - SAMENA Trends - February-March 2021

ARTICLE SAMENA TRENDS

ARTICLE

Unlocking the Power of Industry 4.0 with 5G

Why is 5G such a good fit for manufacturing?
Whereas 4G was all about enhanced mobile broadband and
spawned a host of new applications like Uber and Spotify, 5G is all
about mission critical applications like remote surgery, driverless
cars and massive machine type communications. Manufacturing
sites typically use fixed local area networks (LAN) to connect
things, as wireless technologies can struggle in environments
with a lot of metal. However, this poses a few problems as fixed
cables can’t be moved easily. Often production runs need to be
reconfigured at short notice if there are supply issues or a surge
in demand, and you can’t use LANs for retrofitting sensors as they
are a trip hazard in a busy factory. So, a good, reliable, low-latency
cellular technology using indoor cells is very attractive; and this is
where 5G comes in.

As coronavirus introduces new factors into
the business equation and accelerates
others, manufacturing is looking to 5G to

support its journey to Industry 4.0.

Using 5G to enhance manufacturing operations
Industry 4.0 is all about driving efficiency, something called the
OEE score, which stands for Overall Equipment Effectiveness.
This is calculated by multiplying three things: what percentage
of my machines are available at any given time, of these what
percentage are performing as they should be and of these what Andy Rowland
percentage are producing good quality products. 5G can be used Head of Digital Manufacturing
to reliably and securely connect new sensors to measure things BT
like vibration, pressure and temperature to help predict equipment
failures to improve the OEE score. 5G can also be used to monitor
Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines. CNC machines
often create intricate designs in metal and are controlled by a
computer. If there is any suggestion that there is a problem, they
need to be shut down very quickly (within a tenth of a second)
otherwise the damage can be more than £50,000. Traditionally
PCs have been strapped to each machine tool to manage these
shutdowns, but with the low latency and high availability of 5G, we
now have a viable more cost-effective alternative.

72 FEB-MAR 2021