Making plastics machinery more efficient with M-Powered

Milacron's partnership with ei³ is a true success story in innovative IIoT solutions for injection molding machinery.

Here's how M-Powered was developed to provide significant maintenance and repair cost reductions, uptime increases, and massive energy savings.

The evolution of a partnership

The partnership between Milacron and ei³ started in 2014. Initially, it focused on connecting Milacron's fleets of machines to provide secure remote services and basic IIoT capabilities (such as OEE calculations and tracking downtime) to their industry-leading injection-molding machines.

However, the collaboration quickly expanded to include ei³'s Data Science capabilities to put additional tools into the hands of customers that would provide actionable insights to help maintain their fleet. The analytic tools developed as a result of this decision were wrapped into a suite and released as 'M-Powered' in 2018.

How M-Powered works

M-Powered today represents the state-of-the-art in industrial IoT, providing a rich set of applications to track machine conditions, provide operational advice to operators and predictive information to service technicians, and a platform to efficiently and digitally manage and optimize all parts of the machine operation.

The suite works along three general processes:

• Transitioning machine data into the cloud
• Using analytics engines to turn data into insights
• Providing real-time insights through alerts, desktop applications, and mobile applications

Lifecycle: Preventing failures before they happen

A critical service highlighted is ei³'s LIFECYCLE application, designed to track the deterioration of specific components of a machine to reduce costs and unplanned downtime.

Heater band monitoring

Particularly notable is the use of the application for the maintenance of heater bands, a crucial component of an injection molding machine that heats the plastic granulate inside the barrel to a liquid state.

The traditional maintenance method for heater bands is either based on a time schedule or operator discretion. Often, operators faced with minor alerts and error messages overlook or 'clear' them in order to prioritize uptime.

This leads to inefficient operation and eventually the component's failure, causing increased costs and unplanned downtime.

The difficulty of preventative maintenance for heater bands stems from the machine's automatic compensation for these failures: Faced with reduced heating power, the machines will cycle more energy into neighboring bands to compensate. This approach creates two significant problems:

1. It can prompt more heater band failures through overload
   
   
2. Overworking heater bands results in a significant increase in energy costs, which dramatically outweigh the price of a replacement heater band

Using predictive analytics, manufacturers can be warned of the need to replace a heater band before the component's deterioration causes excessive energy costs that outweigh the cost of the replacement part.

Feed screw degradation tracking

Another prominent example of M-Powered's application of predictive analytics is seen in monitoring and tracking the degradation of feed screws. The degradation of a feed screw differs from that of a heater band - while heater bands eventually fail entirely, feed screw degradation leads to incremental effects on production quality.

This difference requires a new approach to monitoring that:

• Maps the root causes of degradation
• Creates a specific time of replacement based on a client's particular quality needs
• Adjusts recommendations based on industry requirements

For example, by measuring the impact of screw degradation on output quality, M-Powered could recommend replacement for medical industry manufacturers at 90% efficiency, while home goods manufacturers might replace at 60% efficiency. This specific process is crucial for plastics suppliers, where plastic waste is a massive cost and where maintenance schedules directly correlate with quality management.

M-Powered's Lifecycle app detects and quantifies the steady degradation of machine parts using system-wide measurements, providing targeted recommendations based on specific needs.

Real-world results

M-Powered delivers measurable results in the real world.

For example, Orbis, a large Milacron customer, uses M-Powered to predict and proactively replace machine components – and subsequently save 1000 kWh of energy on each machine, the equivalent of what an average American household uses per month.

The improvements at ORBIS also resulted in:

• Record low downtimes
• A more precise maintenance schedule
• Reduced inventory costs by eliminating the need for excess stocking

Predictive Services are just one facet of M-Powered's wide array of IIoT services that help move plastics manufacturing into the future.

Watch the full video on Milacron's M-Powered and its impact on their manufacturing.