BEinCPPS mapped on
Manufacturing system levels

The experiment involves the "CPS-ization" of a mechanical piece of equipment used in the plastic injection process: the mold. It will be enabled with sensors to capture the physical properties relevant during the injection process, mainly temperature and pressure. In certain variations of the smart mold, it will also drive electrical actuators to perform in-mold mechanical movements, such as piece ejection or product version-switching. Sensors: -Temperature: MIKROELEKTRONIKA Thermocouple Type-K Glass Braid Insulated -Pressure: KISTLER 6190C Actuators: -Stepper motor: SM2863-5155

On the Field level is deployed Whirlpool-specific hardware (Controller and Actuator boards) and software (the Test Executor) that are directly connected to the Product under test.

The mold is mounted on top of an press machine, which performs the actual raw material conversion and performs the actual injection process. The smart mold communicates with the press to raise pre-configured alerts when the sensors detect abnormal situations, as well as to guide mechanical movements.

Online results of Product testing are also used for the early detection of problems in the manufacturing plant.

The smart mold publishes data to a production manager workstation, which in the context of a factory gathers all the data from all the work cells i.e. injection presses and provided an enterprise-level view of the deployed molds in production.

Offline analysis of historical Product testing results can be used to identify inefficiencies of production processes across the Enterprise.

The Smart Mold, as a true cyber-physical system, publishes data through a cloud infrastructure. In this cloud space, different applications are made available: -Visualization dashboards through widgets, to allow real-time visualization of production data -Data persistence: Store the physical data acquired by the sensors to enable historical analysis -Integration with information systems (ERP/MES): To trigger mainteinance operations for the mold when these are required