INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND IIOT IN INDUCTION HEAT TREATMENTS INSTALLATIONS

Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) is becoming one of the biggest technology trends in many fields. Every physical object will be transformed into an information source connected with other objects and machines interacting with operators too and giving rise to a lot of data. Induction heat treatment is a quite traditional and well-known process where digital transformation is not completed. In the paper the use of IIoT and the analysis of data coming from sensors will be described with focus on induction heat treatments. Some examples with reference to a simple induction surface hardening will be presented in order to show the big potentiality of Digital Induction Treatments (DIT). DIT could be implemented both for increasing the performances of processes and for improving the quality of workpieces. A traceability of the workpiece during heat treatment process taking into account the influence of the main parameters both (electrical, mechanical, thermal etc.) is already applied in some industrial processes but the use of the data coming from thousands of processes are not used yet. The analytics of these big data could give the opportunity to the operator to work to the machine for its predictive maintenance, to the workpiece to improve its quality, to predict immediately failures and defects and to obtain a huge amount of information which can be used for process energy saving and improving machine performance.