Advancements in Pneumatics Meet Modern Industrial Machinery Demands

Customers are looking across their whole system to see where the leaks are, where the energy is being drawn in the system…and trying to understand how they can manage that overall in the system. That leads to predictive maintenance and diagnostics. Downtime is a killer for productivity, so they need to get broader adaptation of AI (artificial intelligence) driven analytics. Basically, [customers] need components that not only can do the work, but can also give feedback on their status or if they’re doing a specific operation, and are able to detect if they’re failing, leaking or the system is not working the way it was intended. To be able to get that diagnostics back and say something's wrong, customers can really do their preventative maintenance based on feedback from the machine, as opposed to traditionally a maintenance guy making his rounds to all the machines and checking everything. That way they can understand what's healthy, what's not healthy, and react as quickly as they can to [perform maintenance].

And as these machines get more complicated and denser, customers are constantly looking at compact design…[they want] to pack more parts into a smaller space, and be able to still do the loads and the capabilities that they can with bigger components.

Connectivity and smart integration [is also important]. As smart diagnostics come into play and there's talks about Industry 4.0 and digital transformation, we have to be able to understand what are the communication protocols that everybody's starting to use, such as IO-Link and Ethernet IP. Those are continuously changing and standardizing. Sometimes [a communication protocol] may be adopted in one industry but another industry adopts something else, so we have to try to continually develop components that we can adapt as that ever-changing world [of communication protocols] moves very, very quickly.

We also understand that more customers are coming into applications that off-the-shelf solutions [do not exist]. They may be looking through our catalogs and trying to find something, and they can't find it because there's not been something widely released into the markets that they can use. There's continually more requests coming in for specialized products, more than off-the-shelf products, because of the fit [needed for] their applications.

The big challenge when developing the products is lab results in testing versus real-world results. When we're developing [products for] these new markets, like a vehicle or robotics application, we can only do so much in the lab [in terms of] making sure that the product can meet all the requirements. We have to rely a little bit more on our customers to partner with us on getting real-world [use case results so] we can actually see how the application affects the product. Being able to duplicate what [the product] might see in these environments is a challenge because in the lab we can't throw everything at it that will be [experienced in the actual] application.

Power & Motion: What most excites you about working with pneumatics for industrial or other applications, and what further technological developments are you most looking forward to seeing coming into the market in the coming years?

Robert Dickman: I've been in pneumatic engineering for 29 years of my career, and it's always exciting to take expertise in fluid power and be able to talk to customers about their applications and make them realize that there could be a product that we could offer for those applications. To be able to see the need [for fluid power] growing, whether it be semiconductor and automotive manufacturing — which is the big market everybody associates pneumatics with — medical applications, on-vehicle applications, food and packaging or caustic environments, seeing [use in those applications grow] never gets boring.

What's exciting is you may have one customer that's very innovative in how they use pneumatics and fluid power and how they do their controls. Then you have another customer who's not that far in innovation, but it's great to be able to bring to them new products and solutions, and be able to work with them on that. That's what's exciting and really keeps things exciting in pneumatics. And the fact that it will never go away, there's nothing really coming up that's going to replace fluid power. It's always going to have a need in the industry. [Fluid power] will always be strong in the markets due to its advantages. There could be some switching from analog to smarter systems as well as more hybrid systems combining fluid power and electrical controls and actuation for saving energy. If you can convert pneumatics to electric…there's always going to be that balance of which is more beneficial.

Because all these things are growing quickly — AI, the need for gathering data and being able to control things — it becomes interesting to see how the customers adopt it all. You can design components that have all the complexity in the world, but the cost is way too expensive. But if you really work with the customer and understand what kind of data and diagnostics [they want], the solution could be a combination of off-the-shelf products that doesn't [require] all the diagnostics be put into the product; you could put sensors throughout the system and feed that back, as opposed to trying to put it all in one product. So, being able to talk to machine builders and understand their applications and what are they trying to solve, and be able to go to them and say, there's more ways you can do that, and trying to work with them on what makes the most sense for them. That's what is really exciting about working with customers and designing components is, ultimately, trying to find solutions, not just products, for their application and working with them at that.