Principal investigators: Terrance Speicher, Charles Stricker, and Michael Bartolacci
University: Pennsylvania State University - Berks
Industry partner: Brentwood Industries, Inc.
Small and medium manufacturers (SMM) face challenges adopting digital technologies to transform their production environments, such as shop floors. Shop floors must send timely, accurate data to a manufacturing execution system (MES) to efficiently control production operations. MES software can use operational information from an industrial internet of things (IIoT) through a communications network to enable data-driven decision making. One SMM—Brentwood Industries in Reading, Pennsylvania—provides comprehensive thermoformed and injected molded products for diverse markets. The company’s production equipment includes light- and heavy-gauge thermoforming, polymer calendaring, and computer numerical control (CNC) part trimming supported by air compressors, vacuum pumps, and water chillers. This project partners with Penn State Berks to deploy engineering and information sciences students to access, catalog, and characterize shop floor programmable logic controllers (PLC) inputs and outputs. With understanding of the PLC data, the expert-led team will determine quality critical parameters, machine counters, and fault codes essential to process optimization.