In metalworking situations, cooling lubricants (KSS) are part of many manufacturing processes. Lubricoolant emulsions do not merely cool, they reduce friction, protect against corrosion, contribute to higher dimensional accuracy and improve surface quality. They are, however, prone to biological contamination, fungal or bacterial, and thus have to be kept under constant observation, with additives to restore or maintain quality. Being of considerable relevance to employees’ health and safety and to the environment, they are subject to strict legislation.

Add-on sensors automate required KSS testing and offer new functions

In the KSS-Kontrolle project, a system for use in machining has been developed which fully automatically and without interruption captures the data for both process and environment. It thus permits correlation of the quality of the finished products with the condition of the cooling lubricant used as well as the state of the latter with environmental conditions. This new system brings high-quality automated control of KSS (previously available only in the centralised plant of major manufacturers) into the reach of SMEs, despite the fact that they mainly have decentralised machines, each with separate cooling lubrication. The previous manual checks requiring staff and time investment are automated and the digital data comes at shorter intervals, helping to improve process stability, reduce the quantity of additives needed and make it easier for companies to keep within the health, safety and environmental rules.

IMMS provided the sensors and systems for acquisition, transmission, processing, visualisation and cloud storage of climate data

In the project, IMMS has incorporated wireless environmental sensor technology into the system, which can detect this factor directly influencing component quality and to indicate ambient conditions relevant to deterioration of the cooling lubricant. IMMS has used an industrial PC to aggregate the data from all sensor systems on site and to transfer it to a cloud platform. The cloud implementation is technologically compliant with Industry 4.0, providing central data storage and evaluation. The solutions for data storage, data processing and visualisation are open-source. To enable the whole system to be incorporated into particular projects, IMMS has also implemented a means of rolling out the entire software infrastructure to benefit additional installations, with the advantage of keeping manual configuration to a minimum.