Mining drive solutions supplier WEG has announced Nokia’s entry into its Open Lab WEG/V2COM project which is aimed at accelerating and enabling the development of Industry 4.0 solutions in Brazil, with the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) platform. Open Lab WEG/V2COM has a partnership with the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development (ABDI) and Anatel, and will use the Nokia DAC solution to validate the quality and economic model of the solutions to be developed under the project.
WEG stated: “Nokia’s automation platform ensures a reliable, high-bandwidth, low-latency private network, with local edge computing resources, voice and video services, as well as an application catalog. It is a compact and easy to implement platform, consisting of network equipment, a cloud-based operations monitoring system and industrial connectors that facilitate standard and protocol-specific connectivity for the industrial segment.”
The project, expected to last one year, is being developed in a real production environment, in one of WEG’s factories, in Jaraguá do Sul, in the state of Santa Catarina. The results will contribute to Anatel’s studies on regulation of 5G private networks for business uses. The factory will have the function of a laboratory, in which a private 5G network will be tested simultaneously with a conventional network. Performing real tests, in one of the most automated and robotic factories in the WEG group with the highest level of automation and monitoring, there is the possibility to evaluate the application of devices and antennas with 5G technology in order to collect information on frequency ranges, execution period, power and other features required for applications.
Several practical and advanced cases of Industry 4.0 will be developed to verify the productivity gain that the solution may bring, allowing consolidation of consistent models to be applied in industrial automation projects. Thinking about the advancement of post-pandemic technology and the best conditions for using 5G, two radio frequencies will be evaluated: one, below 6 gigahertz (GHz), and the other, higher, between 27.5 GHz and 27.9 GHz. An independent research institute will do the necessary performance analysis. Guilherme Spina, Director of V2Com, of the WEG group, comments: “The project of the 5G pilot plant at WEG will bring the possibility not only of supporting official studies on the use of technology in Brazil, but will also accelerate the development and testing of products and solutions in WEG/V2COM for our customers.”
Marcelo Entreconti, Nokia Head of Enterprise for Latin America, comments: “Our project with WEG is the latest example of the use of Nokia’s 5G private networks to leverage, as a leading supplier and technological partner, the level of Industry 4.0 in Brazil. With our technology, we bring increased productivity to several sectors. We are committed to the demands of the Industry, from the training of people, like our project with OpenLab Senai, as well as the development of use cases such as those being tested and applied by WEG.”
WEG acquired 51% of V2COM’s share capital in 2019, a company specialising in IoT (Internet of Things) and complete telemetry solutions for power and smart grid systems. Founded in 2002, V2COM is headquartered in São Paulo (SP) with a hardware factory in Florianópolis (SC). With strong experience in the energy sector, the company has a broad portfolio of projects implemented in telemetry, reporting, loss analysis and IoT for companies, utilities and service providers of electricity, water, gas, among others. It controls, specifically in the electric utilities segment, assets totaling over 30GW of installed power.
