In a nickel chloride battery factory at General Electric (GE) in Schenectady, New York, USA, more than 10,000 sensors are installed. If it is not labeled at the factory door, it is easy to be mistaken for Hollywood. The "Government Secret Scientific Research Base" in the movie.
More than 10,000 sensors work instead of manual, transmitting battery production data every second, from the temperature of the battery manufacturing process to the pressure of the production hall, as well as the energy consumed by each battery manufacturing... With the iPad, the factory Wifi network is used to obtain data from sensors and supervise the production process.
In the future, GE intends to add the weather forecast to the sensor system. The management personnel can timely correct the operation indicators of each device in the production process according to the changes in the pressure and humidity around the plant to ensure high battery quality.
Randy.T.Rausch, director of manufacturing information at GE Energy Storage, said he never expected the battery to be produced this way.
Jeff Immelt, chairman and CEO of GE, foresaw this trend early. He even plans to label each battery with a serial number and barcode to track the use of each battery after shipment. He also took the opportunity to extend this tracking technology to the field of sales statistics for refrigerators and dishwashers as a commercial basis for the factory to decide to increase production or repair equipment (reduction of production).
In 1995, when Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates published the book The Road to the Future, predicting that the human world will embrace the information age, Immelt is also thinking about a problem. If Internet technology begins to completely change the habits of human consumption, It will change the ecosystem of industrial production.
In fact, this battery factory is the world's first new integrated industrial network, and a test field for Immelt's “Industrial Internetâ€.
In Immelt’s mind, the Industrial Internet will solve many technical problems that could not be overcome in the industrial production field. If the power outage has been overhauled for a long time, a software system that analyzes the operational data of generators and utility pole transformers will be Help the maintenance staff to find the grid fault in the first time.
"Industrial Internet is a huge physical world. It consists of machines, equipment groups, facilities and system networks. It can combine connectivity, big data and digital analysis at a deeper level. It is a new industrial revolution (Industrial Internet RevoluTIon) At the Industrial Internet Leadership Forum in June, Immelt did not hide his obsession.
He knows that from simple electric motorcycles to high-end medical MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines, from power plants to airplanes, from power supply networks to railway systems, as long as there is a network that connects all complex mechanical equipment clusters, resulting in "chemistry Responding and creating greater productivity, the time of the new industrial revolution on Earth is within reach.
The last wave of industrialization originated in the 1950s. At that time, the United States built highways across the country, which enabled industrial innovation technology to wipe out huge commercial value through the "trade chain on the expressway" and lead an era of prosperous industrial economy.
This time, the "highway" became a virtual Internet technology.
GE Global Vice President Lu William said: If the consumer Internet market reaches 1 trillion US dollars, the future industrial Internet will catch up with it sooner or later.
If the airlines sacrifice tens of billions of dollars in profits each year due to the aircraft's delay, a software system that transmits the aircraft's operational data from time to time will detect the various faults in the aircraft for the first time, and the airline can repair the loss early.
If the annual average production loss of deep-sea oil is as high as 15 billion US dollars, a set of underwater remote monitoring software system that collects wellhead, manifold amplitude and temperature, and receives leak detection data can effectively extend the service life and working efficiency of drilling equipment.
FGI SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD , https://www.fgi-tech.com