Intelligent motion control is being accelerated by four key growth drivers: reduced energy consumption, agile production, digital transformation, and the move toward new service-based business models based on reducing downtime and increasing asset utilization in smart manufacturing. Let’s look at each of these four key growth drivers in detail.
Reduced energy consumption
Almost 70% of electricity consumed by industry is used by electric motor systems. Intelligent motion solutions are delivering and will continue to deliver significant reductions in energy consumption by moving more applications from fixed speed motors to high efficiency motors and variable speed drives, in part driven by energy efficiency regulations. This reduction in energy consumption will enable more sustainable manufacturing. Access to motion insights that optimize a manufacturing flow will further reduce energy consumption in smart manufacturing.
Agile production
As industries are adapting to keep up with consumer demand and changing buyer behaviors, agile production, based on reconfigurable production lines, is required to deliver more customization and faster turn-around times. Consumer demand is driving a shift away from low mix, high volume manufacturing toward high mix, low volume manufacturing, which demands greater flexibility on the factory floor.
Complex, repetitive, and often dangerous tasks can now be performed by industrial robots, leading to higher throughput and increased productivity. Agile production increases resilience in a time of disruption and enables a faster response to changing customer demands.
Digital transformation
Global spending on digital transformation will reach $6.8 trillion globally by 2023.2 Variable speed drives and servo drives use data from voltages, currents, position, temperature, power, energy consumption combined with external sensors for monitoring vibration, and other process variables. With a converged information technology/operating technology (IT/OT) Ethernet network, motion applications are networked together communicating data and insights. Motion data and insights are now more accessible and can be analyzed by powerful cloud computing and AI to optimize manufacturing flows and monitor the current state of health of the assets across the entire installation.