Digital Unification is Dependent on Power

At a certain point of its assembly, an electric vehicle (EV) in the factory of the future will be capable of driving itself from station to station. 

Acting as its own conveyor with the knowledge of where it is in the assembly process, the autonomous guided vehicle (AGV) drives to one robot to get a windshield, then to the next to get bumpers. If that station is backed up with delays, it can decide to move over to seatbelts instead. The car will know what parts it has, what it still needs, and where to get them — in real time. It will know the shortest lines in the factory and queue up there.

Once it completes all the steps, it can drive out the door, stopping briefly to honk at the general manager’s office for a thumbs-up before taking off for the highway. The brain of the car now fills with instantaneous information about the distance from guardrail sensors and adjacent semis. The product performs new tasks in a completely different electronic context.

Finally, it reaches its destination: your driveway. It will alert you to let you know the car you ordered has arrived. In the weeks that follow, it makes yet another transformation, becoming a member of the family.  

The EV’s rules of operation are now devised by collecting data on all the household routines and individual preferences. It will remember you want the seat warmed up on weekday mornings when temperatures dip below 50ºF (10ºC). On long trips, it can offer your child an array of their favorite entertainment options (perhaps when the volume of their complaining gets too loud). Knowing your schedule, the EV can head to the shop for a tire rotation while you’re at the dentist.

To contemplate the factory — or the roadway or household — of the future is an exercise in extrapolating a process that is already happening: digital unification. Digital unification is the current evolutionary trajectory of computerized processes. And it is the long-range goal of Industry 4.0, toward which many product developers are now striving. 

However you extrapolate it, we’ll soon find products being made, delivered and used in very different ways –– perhaps not exactly like the scenario above, but something close to it.  

Both the objects and the environment will collect and share information to make decisions. The object can disengage from one environment and ensconce itself in another while adopting a new set of rules and functions.

Because we’ve already witnessed some progress in digital unification, it may be tempting to think the engineering challenge is simply to provide more signal bandwidth for the multitude of products, sensors and robots to come. 

But this neglects the more fundamental engineering obstacle on the path to this industrial internet of things (IIOT) future. 

The big limitation between today and tomorrow is power. 

At the root of today’s digital unification challenge is the convoluted infrastructure that supplies power in industrial settings. Power capabilities grow in facilities gradually over time, so capacity is applied incrementally. The problem is that a sprawling industrial facility with this legacy arrangement will have a hard time making the jump to Industry 4.0.

Water and electricity are close analogues. Let’s say for instance your house used up all the capacity from the water main on your street. To get additional supply, rather than putting in one larger-gauge pipe to the street which would disrupt service and require retrofitting, a second identical supply line is added. When water needs go up even more, you use up your street’s excess capacity and elect to add a pipe from the adjacent street. A year later that is maxed out, so extensions are installed to mainlines three or four streets away.  

Each gradual increase in capacity results in another duplicated layer of infrastructure, which takes up more space in the walls of your house. The source gets farther and farther away, so the pipe needs more pressure. Additionally, and most importantly, when you want to rearrange your fixtures, you may get confused about what source a faucet is drawing from, and whether that line is filled up or not.

Instead of just one stem from the water department to the house, it is served by several branches, each flowing at a different level of capacity. 

Like the plumbing analogy, factories in operation over decades often paint themselves into the same corner with power cabling. 

The accrual of new supply lines can result in crowded spaces, particularly at connection points. Cables can run up to a mile or more, which requires more voltage to maintain the same flow. And as equipment, tools, robots, sensors and other applications multiply, they might find themselves in outlets to a number of different branch lines. These challenges are illustrated in a Molex survey, in which 97% of respondents reported that they face challenges when designing power systems. 

The electrical infrastructure inside today’s automobile, despite (and because of) all its advanced electronic features, suffers from the same kind of cabling congestion. Surprisingly, even in a new car, each electrical mechanism has its own dedicated power cable. To combat these challenges, some EV automakers are looking to replace heavy cabling with busbars to route power from batteries to inverters and motors, and to converters within the vehicle, which allows for ease of insulation and weight savings. Because in an EV, cables are a key contributor to the overall weight on the vehicle — and an increase in weight leads to a decrease in range. 

The legacy architecture could be a microcosm of the automotive factory, and it too faces the same steep growth curve in the number of discrete devices that will need power in the next phase of digital unification (automated driving, RADAR and LIDAR sensors, cockpit controls and so on). 

In fact, the need to monitor and gain more agile control of power, as well as increase the size of the power pipeline to make Industry 4.0 processes work, is occurring at many levels: throughout the facilities, the roadway, the vehicle, and its onboard systems.

The limits of gradual enhanced power supply in dynamic environments, where objects are adding and subtracting themselves to networks, have serious and hardline consequences. Case in point: if the devices and equipment that draw on a power source go beyond capacity, the result is thermal energy. Overheating can cause downtime, as well as permanent damage to equipment and injury to workers. And worker safety is top of mind, according to the same Molex survey mentioned earlier — 66% said functional safety is a consideration when implementing a power system. 

Naturally, in a large factory it is someone’s job to monitor and prevent operations from surpassing this hard limit of power consumption. On the other hand, there is growing pressure to put more and more IIoT equipment, sensors and smart devices to use in the factory setting. 

With a convoluted, multi-branched electrical network, it is difficult to monitor, predict and respond to changes. 

Before the promise of IIoT flexibility can come to fruition, systems need to know what processes are drawing on power at any given moment. And they need the ability to shift supply from one sector of a network to another. 

Molex is on the engineering forefront of delivering power where it needs to be and when. And it realizes that in the future, power monitoring and control needs to be as smart as the car it is building. We are working with major automakers and device manufacturers to develop more intelligent architectures where devices will be served from different power distribution hubs with greater capacity to meet the increasing demands for power and data. Our communication and control solutions are at the heart of the monitoring and logic functionality that ensures the functional integrity and safety of the system.

Products like our innovative Brad M-12 Power L-Code Connectors allows machine builders and integrators to meet increasing capacity requirements for control power and motor power with a plug-and-play wiring solution that delivers nearly 3x the power of its predecessor, the 7/8” mini-change. Additionally, M12 power solutions are rapidly emerging as the choice for 24VDC device power infrastructure, supporting up to 60% more power than the solutions commonly used just a few years ago.

Molex is unveiling another vital solution supporting the IIoT infrastructure: the next generation Power over Data Line (PoDL) cable called Single Pair Ethernet (SPE), designed specifically to address increasing demands for data and power at the field level.

At all levels of system design, power requirements must be understood in real time so that capacity can respond to the spontaneous expansions of networks. Molex brings unprecedented expertise and capability to the power conundrum, no matter which industry or application requires it.