Industry 4.0: A Realisable Concept and Its Implementation for Digital Real-Time Monitoring of Thermal and Energy-Intensive Industrial Processes Using the Foundry Industry as an Example

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is one of the most industry pushing developments of the present. The potential benefits such as process transparency, real-time process knowledge, instant reaction possibilities and, following from all this, a better general process understanding are just a few of the advantages of this development. For many of these industrial sectors, monitoring and maintaining correct temperature levels - going hand-in-hand with energy consumption - is crucial for stable and reproduceable processes. Here, I4.0-solutions have the potential to contribute to more resilient and efficient processes. While solvent large companies has the financial and employee resources to realise solutions in the sense of industry 4.0, especially small and medium-sized companies (SME) often struggle with this (for them) still novel technological topics, all the more so if they are characterised by craftsmanship and a high proportion of the work steps are still carried out manually. For this reason, this paper presents a realisable and proofed concept of real-time process-monitoring of thermal and energetical parameters in an industrial scale on the example of the foundry industry, that can easily be transferred to other processes. It describes the necessary soft- and hardware framework and, that way, opens the door for SME-companies to enter the field of industry 4.0.