IOT News

In process industries such as cement, metallurgy, chemicals, and mining, weighing feeders are critical equipment for continuous material conveying, precise batching, and stable feeding. Their operational reliability directly impacts production efficiency and product quality.

Take the building materials industry as an example. Raw material preparation workshops typically deploy multiple weighing feeders for precise batching of materials like limestone, iron powder, and sandstone. However, equipment operational data—such as instantaneous flow rate, cumulative weight, belt speed, and motor current—remains confined to local monitoring systems, creating data silos. Management lacks real-time visibility into equipment status and process parameters, fault detection is delayed, and it is difficult to perform correlation analysis between material consumption and output. An efficient and reliable IoT solution is urgently needed.

Solution

To address this challenge, WideIOT deploys PLC data acquisition gateways compatible with Siemens, Mitsubishi, Omron, Schneider Electric, and other major PLC brands. These gateways collect real-time core data from weighing feeders—including operational status, instantaneous flow rate, belt speed, motor current, and cumulative weight—and transmit it to the enterprise MES system via 5G/4G/Wi-Fi/Ethernet. This enables centralized monitoring, exception alerting, remote control, and statistical analysis across multiple units, supporting the development of intelligent, efficient, and safe digital factories.

Key Features

The gateway adapts to PLCs from different brands, collecting real-time data on equipment status, flow rate, speed, current, and cumulative weight, with support for data resume-on-reconnection and multi-network failover.

Customizable alert rules allow automatic notifications via WeChat, SMS, or email when anomalies are detected, enabling rapid fault identification and diagnosis while reducing the risk of unplanned downtime.

A visual dashboard provides an at-a-glance overview of each feeder's location, operational status, load rate, and alarm frequency, offering a comprehensive view of workshop batching operations and supporting optimized resource allocation.

The gateway supports two-way communication with PLCs, allowing authorized personnel to remotely issue commands such as valve switching and equipment start/stop, improving emergency response efficiency and ensuring production safety.

Daily, weekly, and monthly reports are automatically generated on demand, covering key metrics such as total material fed, alarm frequency, and fault distribution, significantly reducing manual data compilation efforts.

In-depth analysis is performed by correlating batching, equipment, and fault data, providing quantitative insights for process parameter optimization, predictive maintenance, and performance uation. This data-driven approach supports informed decision-making and helps achieve cost reduction and operational efficiency gains.