Remote Manufacturing Process Monitoring, Control & Troubleshooting Through Machine Learning IIoT

Monitor Coatings and TRL9 are both surface engineering companies with customers from all key industry sectors both in the UK and abroad. Over the last 5 years, with the support from Innovate UK, both companies have developed game changing technologies that are shared, through technology transfer licenses, to customers and competitors alike. Such outward transfer of technology has become an important dimension in our corporate strategies and has created a highly interdependent ecosystem between MCL, TRL9 and the organisations currently using our technologies.

Due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, most of the work is currently done remotely. However, in the absence of sophisticated digital remote assistance and monitoring tools the quality of technical and service support to our licensees is extremely compromised. This in turn has causes disruption within the supply chain affecting several UK companies.

**Value Proposition:** The proposed concept is a flexible system that makes quality management, training and troubleshooting easier by connecting and automating the coating application activities throughout the ecosystem. Live and historic spray data will be available to a database enabling issues that affect quality to be quickly identified and resolved centrally-even across global operations and into the supplier network.The key value proposition of the digital twin is its ability to combine real-time data, physical dependency models and intelligence from different platforms to simulate, predict and improve assets and E2E processes.

**Equality, diversity and inclusion**:Unlike the traditional male dominated surface engineering industry; IoT and Digital Manufacturing presents itself naturally as a genderless and inclusive sector.

**Environment:** Thermal spray is a viable alternative to carcinogenic hard chrome plating. The proposed platform will offer a non-destructive coating testing method minimising the waste disposal during cutting and polishing of samples and will result in less part rejections and reworks across all plants using this technology.