Siemens Gerätewerk Erlangen (GWE) operates 11 depaneling machines within their printed circuit board (PCB) production process. The milling process produces a fine dust that is accumulated in the milling spindles. This dust can hinder the constant rotation of spindles or, worst case, leads to an unplanned breakdown. 

That's why the GWE wanted to use the available data (generated by the PCB milling spindles) to reduce the risk of unplanned downtime to a minimum and detect anomalies before they occur. 

Siemens Service experts provided a cloud-based solution using Predictive Services for Depaneling Machines which analyzes spindle current and speed and detects anomalies. In the first step, all the spindles needed to be connected to a suitable cloud-based application. If required, this service can also be deployed as an on-premises application. 

Therefore, the spindle's current and speed are collected by using the SIMATIC IOT Gateway MQTT and MindConnect Nano. The necessary data is acquired and transferred to the AI-based Predictive Services App "Spindle Anomaly Detector".
The data is continuously analyzed, processed, and visualized. Thanks to artificial intelligence, future critical states of the machine can be predicted today. AI is capable of constantly learning and improving the accuracy of the anomaly detection. Furthermore, the app sends out notifications to the whole maintenance team if an anomaly is detected.  

Combined with the monitoring of our milling filters and the SINUMERIK-integrated Insights Hub application ManageMyMachines (MMM), the Siemens GWE gets a digital copy of their core technology milling in the cloud.

In October 2023, the customer decided to scale up the service and connect other assets in addition to the depaneling machines and thus set up a comprehensive predictive maintenance system. For this reason, Siemens experts integrated Predictive Services for Depaneling Machines into a holistic Senseye Predictive Maintenance solution. Thanks to the secure transfer of all previously collected data and the numerous expansion options in the Siemens Predictive Maintenance portfolio, this was possible without any problems.

The Siemens Gerätewerk Erlangen (GWE) is a large plant to produce controls located in Erlangen with around 1,200 employees. Founded in 1971, it has been continuously optimized. The main products are SINUMERIK, SINAMICS and SIMOTION and various variants. The GWE is one of the pioneers regarding digitalization AI in production within Siemens.