How to Make Your Paint Mixing Room Industry 4.0 Ready

Industry 4.0 is the new standard in modern factories and production environments. Machines are digitally connected and monitored to optimise production performance and efficiency.

Making your factory paint mixing room Industry 4.0 ready can be simple and cost-effective.

Industry 4.0 refers to the fourth industrial revolution, where all parts in a factory are digitally connected to one network and share information. By integrating Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies, a smart factory increases production performance and efficiency.

Machines tell how much they produce, what their status is and which parts need to be replaced. Sensors tell where products are in the production chain and if they meet all requirements.

Industry 4.0 is more than the implementation of new technologies. All production processes undergo a transformation based on four design principles:

1. Interconnection: All areas are connected to share valuable information about machine and product status, maintenance issues, production demand, etc. Bridges are also built to the outside world.
2. Information transparency: All data is collected and stored in one central network. Access to real-time data and insights enables you to more quickly identify and fix problems. It also helps you more accurately plan for the future.
3. Technical assistance: New technologies provide the technical assistance to make production easier and more efficient. Instead of machines taking over their jobs, workers can upgrade their job skills.
4. Decentralised decisions: Collecting information in one central place, does not mean machines will no longer store and process data locally. For safety, flexibility and efficiency reasons, it is important that systems can take decentralised decisions.

Paint mixing is an important step in the industrial finishing process. When not carried out properly, it can lead to paint shear, bad finish quality, repetitive flushing, undesired downtime, and other issues further down the production chain.

By adding technology to closely monitor paint quality and equipment performance, factory paint lines can gain more efficiency and better results. An Industry 4.0 factory paint mixing room can run on its own, collecting data and adjusting processes accordingly.

There is an easy and cost-effective way to introduce your paint line to Industry 4.0: Graco’s Intelligent Paint Kitchen. It is a smart, modular, easy, and cost-effective system for monitoring and controlling your paint mix room without the use of a PLC (programmable logic controller).

Intelligent Paint Kitchen sensors, actuators and control modules communicate with each other to optimise the performance of your paint supply and circulation system. Connected via IoT (Internet of Things) technology, the system allows you to see and store the data needed to track and analyse all aspects of your industrial finishing operation.