The last week of October 2022 the most recent edition of Bauma took place. For Zensor this was an event with a double goal. The main one was the official launch of the SmartSheetPile together with ArcelorMittal, a second one was related to discovering new developments in a number of industries we’re active in.
The biggest news was the launch of the SmartSheetPile. This new product for the owners and operators of assets like ports, underground parking garages, water treatment installations… was launched at Bauma. After months of preparing a full-scale demonstrator was shown where the visitors could experience the full solution: from sensor hardware, over analytics engine till user interfacing in a Digital Twin dashboard. The SmartSheetPile has the ambition to become the intelligent heart of the asset. It provides information about long-term evolutions, where deviating behavior is noticed in an early stage or remaining lifetime estimates are updated, but also sudden events having an impact on integrity, such as collisions or changes in ground water levels are detected. On the booth visitors could interact with a sheet pile and have the effect of there actions displayed immediately: shocks, inclination, material loss through corrosion, structural deformation and water levels. And, as it was a Smart sheet pile, we of course could derive some data from it as well:
- in total 130 demonstration sessions were conducted on the Bauma booth
- The largest buckling inward (the push with the highest force) resulted in a strain of 508 microstrain, the highest buckling inward (the stringest pull) caused a strain of -524 microstrain.
- The biggest shock observed amounted to 7,35g
- The strongest inclination induced was 9,72°
The setup attracted different types of visitors: designers, asset owners, but also installation companies (contractors) and providers of installation tools.
When exploring the rest of the fairground, we encountered a lot of familiar machines used in the Construction Materials as well as Mining & Minerals sectors we operate in. Suppliers of sieves, conveyors and presses showed new concepts. Also various mixers, small and large were on display. Most impressive were of course entire production lines for concrete products such as tiles, including mixers, conveyors, presses, drying lines and stackers or similar robots for putting all on pallets or in other transport vectors. On the mining side a number of grinders and crushers, both mobile as well as stationary, were shown.
Although concepts like ‘As a Service’ and ‘Digital Twin’ are brought up very frequently in relation to production machines, the number of really ‘Smart’ installations encountered was rather limited. We can thus conclude that there’s still quite some room for technological advances, which of course makes life exciting and promising for the future.