With Matt Clinite, Ipsen USA Sales Director and Tom Sepaniak, Software Engineer & Service Technical Support
Manually tracking every detail of a heat-treating operation – recipes, temperatures, maintenance logs—can quickly become overwhelming, especially when maintaining Nadcap/AMS2750 compliance. The more furnaces you operate, the more complex record-keeping becomes, increasing the risk of errors and inefficiencies.
SCADA systems – Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition – are designed specifically to automate monitoring and data collection, tracking and archiving critical information.
SCADA systems work in one of four ways:
- Monolithic systems operate independently and are best suited for older setups or single-furnace operations with strict security needs.
- Distributed systems connect multiple PLCs across a LAN, enabling easy communication and scalability in single-facility operations.
- Networked systems extend this to multiple locations via WAN, useful for companies operating across national or global scales.
- IoT-integrated systems allow remote monitoring and predictive analytics, providing global access and real-time alerts for equipment issues.
How can SCADA reduce costs?
SCADA systems reduce costs by automating key processes like recipe management, real-time monitoring, and data collection. These systems also ensure data redundancy, meet compliance standards, and offer valuable insights that improve overall operational efficiency.
Recipe Uniformity
In a vacuum furnace cluster every system needs to be able to provide the same uniform process for a given part. Having a centralized database of recipes that can be pushed to each furnace will ensure recipe uniformity, and avoid operator error and wasted time. Recipe uniformity also helps identify when a furnace is delivering different results, making troubleshooting easier by isolating the issue and ruling out inconsistent recipes across furnaces.
Monitoring
Monitoring becomes easier across several furnaces when you have one centralized monitoring station. Shared status monitoring makes it easier to build a schedule for loading and unloading parts that is staggered throughout the day, ensuring that work is evenly paced for peak efficiency. It also allows operators to track recipe changes and link them to QC reports for consistent results, reducing scrapped parts.
Internet-connected SCADA systems can even allow for remote monitoring when recipes are running in off-hours. Alerts can indicate potential problems or failures that could cause downtime. These push notifications can alert operators or team leads if an anomaly occurs, with some systems even allowing remote controls to instruct the systems to alter or halt the process until the anomaly can be resolved.
Reporting and Data Storage
Many SCADA systems allow the end user to create custom reports which can be modified and refined at any given time. Consider the ability to compare multiple furnaces to look for ways to optimize efficiency across the board. For example – comparing operation cycles to energy consumption and peak versus off-peak energy pricing to look for operational procedure modifications that could reduce overall costs.
As systems cross multiple locations, trend reports can see where work is being done more efficiently, set alerts that prepare operators for regularly scheduled maintenance at remote sites, indicate where furnaces may need to be repaired or upgraded, and generate centralized reports that meet Nadcap compliance standards. Centralized data is also easier to back up, either to a cloud-based system or a dedicated backup server.
By integrating SCADA systems into a vacuum furnace operation, users have more control over their operations, they can reduce the time staff spends on troubleshooting, documentation, and the associated non-compliance risks that a company could face if documentation is incorrect, incomplete, or lost.