Use case: LoRaWAN in industry.

The different sectors and industrial sites have little in common, an automotive component factory and a pharmaceutical or food&beverage company are governed by quite different rules and needs. However, all of them continue to seek continuous improvement of their process and increase the degree of automation at the lowest possible cost.

One of the paths used for this has been the use of wireless communication technologies. It is not uncommon to find Wifi networks in a plant, but it is not so common for them to have extended use.

Wifi networks in OT have never been widely accepted, their low range and poor immunity to noise is an insurmountable problem. Similarly, its transmission capacity (MB/s) is useful for connecting to PLCs and controllers, but unnecessarily large and energy-intensive to deploy IIoT initiatives. Currently, many of these types of initiatives are rejected because they are either too complex to carry out – requiring the massive installation of modems throughout the factory – or too expensive – requiring the maintenance team to be constantly changing the batteries of the devices -.

LoRaWAN, on the other hand, is a technology that was designed from the beginning to enable IIoT initiatives. Its characteristics make it ideal for this scenario since with a single antenna – or two in very large installations – the entire installation can be covered, its low consumption guarantees that the batteries can last for years, the security and encryption of the messages is native and its ADR functionality allows guaranteeing communication even in the most complex scenarios.

The possibilities of use are many. In this post we discuss five generic use applications, useful for any type of industry:

1 – Process Tracking.

The long range of LoRaWAN and its low consumption allows installing a set of instrumentation or sensors that allows knowing much better the current state of your manufacturing or process. It is evident that the indispensable sensors are already installed, but not those that, without being essential, can also provide very useful information. For example, is the temperature of all tanks or as many cold spots as desired controlled?

2 – Preventive and Predictive Maintenance.

The first step for preventive maintenance is knowing the current state of your machinery. The classic example is the vibration of a motor or the noise it makes, until now it was unfeasible to install a sensor in all of them, now it is not. In addition, all this new data will allow predictive maintenance tools to generate much more accurate scenarios, alerts and studies, predicting much better what is going to happen.

3 – Energy Management.

EMS systems are increasingly being used in factories to control their energy expenditure. As it was not initially considered, there is often no detailed knowledge of the consumption of each electrical line and its divisions, but only that of a set of lines. Currently there are already meters that can retransmit their consumption (current or accumulated) via LoRaWAN. In addition, if you want to keep the ones that are already installed, there are also options to read their value from them – typically via Modbus RTU – and transmit it via LoRaWAN to the system.

4 – Environmental Monitoring.

LoRaWAN also allows monitoring the interior environment of the factory, not so much for issues of waste or control of gases emitted to the outside – all of which makes more sense to sensorize outside the factory – but to be able to detect leakage of spills in the tanks, emission of harmful gases, air conditioning in the different areas or a point as critical and difficult to control as legionellosis – allows ensuring that the tanks and pipes are purged above or below the temperature indicated to ensure the health of the air conditioning -.

5 – Coordination with the Elements Attached to the Factory.

Attached elements such as warehouses or outdoor facilities. In the end, production and productivity do not depend solely on what happens within the walls of the factory, but it is also necessary to know and improve everything that affects the process in question.

However, it must be borne in mind that in order to exploit the possibilities of LoRaWAN, everything that is installed in the factory must be completely interoperable with the existing monitoring and control systems. If the architecture and devices are well chosen, it will not be difficult to integrate all these new equipment. For this, the most common thing is to use a Gateway that has the ability to translate the Payloads coming from the devices to the MQTT protocol – and do the same, but with the reverse path -. If the control system does not have the ability to communicate via MQTT, tools such as KEPServerEX or OPC Router can be used to send this data to all the necessary applications, whether to the SCADA, to databases, to IoT platforms, to Big Data systems or even directly to the ERP.

If you are interested in learning more about the different LoRaWAN applications that can improve your factory and how easy they are to test and install, do not hesitate to contact us.