If you’ve spent any time at industry conferences over the past few years, you’ve likely seen the projections about how many billions of devices will be connected in the next few years. So far, most of the connections discussed have either been of the higher end industrial variety (e.g., systems with servers) or the low-level consumer variety (e.g., refrigerators). However, more evidence is appearing that highlights how deep into production operations IoT (Internet of Things) connectivity is beginning to reach.
Siemens announced that Ham-Let Group, a manufacturer of industrial flow systems, valves, fittings, and components for control and transmission of gases and liquids in high-pressure and high-temperature pipelines, is using MindSphere—Siemens’ cloud-based, open IoT operating system—to connect its control and instrumentation components to the cloud. Ham-let Group is using Mindsphere on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
According to Ham-Let Group, the company is incorporating this cloud-based technology into its products to “provide new capabilities to increase reliability, reduce costs, minimize the physical space required for valve rigs and open new possibilities that were too expensive or too complex to implement in the past.”
Amir Widmann, Ham-Let Group CEO, said, “As we have gone through the Industry 4.0 revolution, we increasingly realized the need to move to digital systems and connect the valves to the cloud. Previously, a valve was only able to open and close. Now, the Ham-Let IIoT valves can sense the matter that passes through them, as well as various environmental conditions such a temperature, pressure, vibration, humidity, acoustics and more. Using a combination of machine learning, edge computing and the cloud, connected Industrial IoT valves provide customers with accurate and cost effective measurement and monitoring capabilities.”
Connecting the valves to MindSphere allows Ham-Let Group to implement device management, analytics and visualization for its products. The IoT gateway system Ham-Let Group has built with MindSphere allows for the display of parameters and historical data for each valve.
These IoT gateways can also be used to detect leaks, bursts or deviations from normal operations in real-time through the use of AWS IoT Analytics and AWS Greengrass. These AWS technologies analyze data streams from the valves using machine learning models created with AWS SageMaker that run within the AWS Greengrass execution environment.
“Ham-Let is creating amazing Industrial IoT solutions for their customers,” said Steve Bashada, executive vice president of Siemens Cloud Application Services. “This is a powerful proof point of MindSphere’s ability to provide open platform-as-a-service (PaaS) coupled with native AWS accessibility to create valuable solutions.”
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