Industrial plants and factories
In serial production, a stopped line is not measured by the cost of one panel or one bearing.
In line-based manufacturing such as automotive and white goods, the cost of a failure is not the repair invoice — it is the hour the line stands still. A hot spot in a motor control centre or a bearing defect in a conveyor gearbox is a small event on its own, and still stops the entire line.
Contact
The cost is in the stopped line, not the failure
In serial production the number that drives the economics is not the price of the failed part. A bearing in a conveyor gearbox is an inexpensive component; that bearing seizing mid-shift means hours of a stopped line. The same asymmetry is sharper on the electrical side: a fire in a motor control centre takes out not just the panel but everything it feeds, and recommissioning is then bound to material lead times.
That is why the investment decision is not weighed between the monitoring system and the maintenance budget, but between unplanned downtime and a planned maintenance window.
In automotive plants
Robot joints in the body shop, press-shop drive units, paint-shop ventilation and assembly conveyors produce different problems and call for different probes.
Robotic joints and high-speed drives need VibroPro Sense (VIB-201): early-stage bearing defects and gear mesh harmonics appear in the upper kilohertz range, and a standard 1.6 kHz probe cannot resolve them.
Presses, conveyor drive units, fans and compressors are covered by Vibro Sense (VIB-101).
In paint shops and welding areas, AirQuality Sense shows ventilation adequacy from measured data rather than assumption, through its TVOC and air quality index channels.
In white goods manufacturing
Hydraulic units on injection moulding machines, press lines, enamel and paint ovens, assembly conveyors and test lines. What they have in common is many similar machines running at once — which is exactly where fleet-scale learning pays off most.
When data from hundreds of motors of the same type comes together, the leading signature of a particular failure mode is learned from machines that have already experienced it and applied to those that have not. That is Cortex Cloud’s job.
Electrical infrastructure
The critical points are the same in both sectors: motor control centres, low-voltage switchboards and power factor correction panels. ArcFire Sense is mounted inside these panels and measures the outgassing signature produced by loosening terminals, rising contact resistance and insulation breakdown — before any smoke forms.
Installation has no operational impact: probes go in without cutting power, and commissioning does not halt production.
Where to start
There is no need to cover the whole inventory in the first phase. The sensible approach is to start with the equipment that stops the line when it stops: bottleneck machines, drive units with no standby, main supply panels. A single IQ Panel carries up to 32 probe nodes, and coverage extends later on the same infrastructure.
Recommended product combination
- CTX-IQ-100IQ PanelThe edge controller that hosts the Cortex platform's embedded AI inference engine.
- VIB-101Vibro SenseA three-axis vibration and surface temperature condition-monitoring probe for rotating equipment.
- VIB-201VibroPro SenseA wide-bandwidth spectral analysis probe for high-speed rotating equipment.
- ARF-005ArcFire SenseA multi-channel gas, thermal and electrical signature probe for electrical panels.
Frequently asked questions
Can it be installed without stopping production?
Yes. Probes are installed without cutting power and with no mechanical modification to the panel enclosure; magnetic, adhesive-pad and stud mounting options suit live installation. The line carries on running normally while the system collects data during commissioning.
Will it connect to our existing MES and SCADA?
Yes. Results are exported over Modbus TCP, Modbus RTU and MQTT/TLS with no middleware layer. Because every probe type reports into a single consistent register model, there is no per-sensor driver development.
How many assets can be monitored on one line?
The field bus is a daisy chain supporting up to 32 nodes per IQ Panel. A single cable run serves every probe along a machine line, with no dedicated run per probe, and coverage can be extended later on the same infrastructure.
Do dozens of machines running at different speeds need individual tuning?
No. Each probe learns the reference signature of the equipment it is mounted on during commissioning, and the health score is computed as a deviation from it. The same software runs on a press, a conveyor and a compressor without thresholds being defined one by one.