My report from this summer’s Honeywell User Group included some new advances they are making with battery storage systems. The growth of wind and solar and other new forms of electricity generation that are not “always on” realizes better utility through methods of storing electricity to cover times when they are not generating. Honeywell’s new Ionic system steps up its utility.
Large-scale battery storage systems enable utilities to improve renewable power generation with an industry-leading battery management system
One of the first of its kind, Nuvation’s BMS provides users with significant flexibility and greater insights into the battery’s performance. The system is easy to install and maintain and offers a cost-competitive and reliable solution for commercial and industrial customers. Offering large-scale storage for renewable energy generation, Honeywell Ionic supports up to 1500-volt inverters to increase system efficiency and includes Nuvation Energy’s industry-leading battery management system (BMS).
“Energy storage is one of the fastest growing energy industry technologies in the world, and solutions like this will be critical to enabling governments and businesses to meet their carbon emission reduction targets,” said Michael Worry, CEO of Nuvation Energy. “Our collaboration with Honeywell will allow companies to take control of their own sustainability journey.”
With Honeywell Ionic, customers can add modular systems to increase capacity. Since Nuvation’s BMS is configurable for any battery, it can also support different batteries from those in the original BESS. A single system can combine batteries that differ by chemistry, performance profile, age, and state of health.
These solutions enable intermittent renewable generation like solar and wind to be stored and reduces sudden sags or surges in power supplied to customers. Many utility grids cannot add more renewable energy without storage to avoid the destabilizing impacts its large-scale integration creates. Honeywell Ionic will be used by both utilities “in front of the meter” and commercial and industrial customers “behind the meter” for a range of energy storage applications, including demand charge management, transmission and distribution upgrade deferral, energy arbitrage, and grid resiliency.
“Combining Honeywell’s energy storage technology with Nuvation Energy’s battery management has created an efficient large-scale storage solution that addresses users’ key pain points,” said Sarang Gadre, Vertical Leader, Infrastructure and New Energy, Honeywell Process Solutions. “By pairing Nuvation’s Gen 5 BMS with Honeywell Ionic, we are helping to address tomorrow’s problems, today.”
My career spans three technology/market cycles. I’ve seen the excitement of new companies, new technology adaptations, new markets three times. All as user and marketing/sales and writer/influencer.
I got involved thanks to a boss with the IT world in the late 70s. At the same time I started playing around with PCs—a Timex Sinclair that I wrote games and education aids for my wife’s 3rd grade class and a Radio Shack TRS-80 that I began setting my dad’s accounting business on. This was before 1980. The deep dive into automation for machinery came in the mid-80s. I’ve followed these passions ever since.
There were large and stimulating media around all three markets. Remember all the products in PC Magazine and its siblings in the 80s and 90s? When I switched to media in 1998 at Control Engineering, it also was packed with new products as many new companies sprang up with a new take on control platforms or software.
Then I experienced the consolidation and maturity of all three markets. IT magazines…gone. PC magazines…gone (maybe a couple on the web). Automation and control magazines are half the size of 15 years ago…and maybe even less. I saw it coming in 2013 when I left Automation World and struck out as an independent writer in the space.
The MacBook Air M2 I’m writing this on is faster and has more memory than the MacBook Air I had a decade ago. But really, it’s still the MacBook Air. Excitement in the PC industry has not been PCs but mobile phones that are really computing devices. There exist a few thriving companies in the industrial market right now—mostly software companies.
There is still innovation in each of the spaces. Certainly all the excitement of playing around with the tech is gone.
What is the next big question for each of these technology markets? Or, what big question will generate an entirely new technology market? Remember, the real reason humanity has developed new technology has been to solve a problem to help humanity (well, aside from gaining an advantage in war).
One interesting thing remains—sustainability. We made so many products enabling production and manufacturing that fouled the soil and atmosphere. Now engineers are taking the technology and using it to clean up the mess. I’ve had interesting conversations with Honeywell and Rockwell Automation and ABB. And even Siemens on the topic. As we forge into a world looking for cleaner energy than fossil fuels, theses companies will supply the technology to help entrepreneurs develop and market solutions.
I am a student of corporate strategy and messaging. The major automation companies intrigued me when they all switched from messaging their mission as automation to software. Now Rockwell Automation is messaging itself as the digital transformation company. I don’t know what that all means, but I’m intrigued.
Further, Rockwell Automation’s strategy during the past five-six years has emphasized acquisition and partnership over internal development. Think PTC, Plex, FiiX.
I’m not condemning, just observing. That’s what I do. Observe and think.
An important part of Rockwell’s strategy focuses on sustainability. Decades after radio personality Earl Nightingale proclaimed the benefits of hydrogen fuel, industrial technology companies are working on the problem of how to economically produce hydrogen.
Enter a collaboration. Systems Integrator Avid Solutions has announced a collaboration with Rockwell Automation to “accelerate and optimize the production of Green Hydrogen (H2) for companies worldwide.”
The news release cites Avid Solutions as specializing in delivering comprehensive Green H2 solutions for industrial producers. I remember the company in other market areas, but I’m glad to see it tackling this area.
“We are seeing many original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), process licensors, and producers entering the Green H2 Economy. They need expertise to scale, as well as speed to market entry,” said Tom O’Reilly, vice president, sustainability, Rockwell Automation. “With more than three decades of expertise in the process industries and helping OEMs scale, Avid Solutions is uniquely suited to help new Green H2 clients implement best-in-class technology and ensure their business needs are met.”
Having previously collaborated on a variety of projects, Avid Solutions and Rockwell Automation have a track record of successfully supporting electrolyzer OEMs, H2 liquefaction licensors, licensors of long-duration energy storage (LDEH), and compressor OEMs in ensuring optimal and consistent outcomes. The two companies also assisted a leading supplier of Green H2 solutions to reduce project risk, integrate new technologies and overcome obstacles related to implementing OT.
“Clients developing Green H2 projects face many challenges. From compressed schedules to meet incentives, new processes, initial feasibility and budgeting, to project execution, producers and OEM providers need an experienced partner to rely on,” said Gordon Bordelon, vice president, operations and technology, Avid Solutions. “By leveraging Avid’s experience in Green H2, plant operations across multiple industries, OEM solutions, and our use of off-the-shelf technologies, we’re helping clients reduce time to market, CapEx as well as OpEx investments, and overall project risk.”
Honeywell engineers have been busy with a variety of sustainability technology applications. Beyond what I’ve written previously here is another initiative.
Honeywell announced an expansion to its Honeywell Forge Sustainability+ for Industrials | Emissions Management software application that allows industrial companies to measure and monitor both direct and indirect greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of their operations.
The software application can collect data from Honeywell’s leading sensors and gas-cloud imaging cameras to measure direct GHG emissions, also known as Scope 1 emissions. The new capability aggregates data from additional sources to measure indirect GHG emissions from the purchase of energy, known as Scope 2 emissions.
Despite global efforts in decarbonizing the power sector, electricity and heat generation are responsible for over 40% of global CO2 emissions, one of the main types of greenhouse gas. Measuring, calculating and accounting emissions are key steps to abate emissions and are incentivized by the recently enacted Inflation Reduction Act in the U.S. GHG emissions are also regulated around the world.
“Honeywell’s newly expanded solution provides customers with a more comprehensive view of their emissions and a critical tool toward meeting their sustainability goals,” said Ravikrishnan Srinivasan, vice president and general manager of Emissions Management at Honeywell Connected Enterprise. “Honeywell is uniquely positioned with its ready-now technology and experience to be the transformational partner that helps organizations accelerate their progress in achieving sustainability outcomes.”
Last winter I got sucked in by an advertisement from Verizon. My wife was due for a new iPad and could use a new iPhone. I was thinking about upgrading my 2-year-old iPhone. The ad looked like a good deal to trade in a bunch of stuff and walk out with new equipment. In the end, you never get the deal exactly as advertised because of nuances. But we did it.
I bet you’ve traded in a phone or two in your life. Ever wonder what happens to those old traded-in phones? You are about to find out.
A publicist I’ve known for a while who (unlike most these days) knows me and what I like to write about, pitched me a story about an actual user of automation. I said great, I’d like something beyond just a new feature in the software. Except the company was Assurant. I looked them up. An insurance company. In 25 years, I doubt that I’ve written about insurance once.
But she’s trustworthy and the application seemed appropriate, so here we are. A story about how a division of Assurant has built a big business taking in traded-in mobile phones and reinserts most of them back into the supply chain. If you’ve bought a refurbished phone, chances are it went through one of their facilities.
That’s how I wound up on a Microsoft Teams call with Brandon Johnson. He is the Senior Vice President of Engineering and Automation at Assurant, a leading global business services company that supports, protects and connects major consumer purchases. Johnson oversees all engineering and automation initiatives related to the mobile device lifecycle across 20 locations worldwide. His primary responsibility is to lead a team that implements innovative software and robotics technologies to enhance efficiency, safety, quality, and device value.
We’ll walk through the process they have developed for processing 15 million phones per year. Then we’ll look at how automation has improved workforce stability, worker safety, and throughput.
First, Johnson told me his background and education were industrial engineering and operations management. Automation was something he picked up along the way. Before automating anything in the processes at Assurant, though, he emphasized two things:
They don’t automate simply to replace workers
Every automation project must have a business purpose
So, what happens when your used phone hits one of their facilities?
Incoming material is all in boxes. There is no uniformity to the boxes. They must all be opened and the phones removed. The original process used people with razor box knives. These are a safety hazard (I know, I had a job using them once). The job also was not challenging which led to excessive attrition.
After phones are decartoned, they are provided with a QR Code ID. They proceed to a charging station as all need a minimum amount of charge for downstream processes. They go to a cosmetic grading station and then sorting into those who have potential high value and those not so much to those that will just be ground for recycling. Next comes a diagnostic test station where 65 tests are performed. Data cleaning comes next. This is a crucial step and Assurant is certified for data cleaning. They’ll perform and value-added repair if feasible. Then, on to the warehouse to be sold and shipped.
Automation has been added so far:
Machine to slit the incoming boxes and cartons. This changed the job from manual knives to a technician job. That job is more stable and has value-added skills
Cosmetic grading is highly complex and subjective. Assurant has developed a patented automation for inspection and grading the phones. Once again, a high-turnover job turned into technician roles leading to a more stable and trained workforce.
Diagnostics testing has been upgraded from a single workstation where they’d dump a bunch of phones on a person and they’d perform all the tests on a single computer. Now there is a flow to the system easing the bottlenecks.
A robotic feeder brings phones to the charging stations and plugs them in saving yet another rote job.
I asked about recycling the powder from groundup phones. They send to a third party who can extract the various metals from the powder for reinsertion into that supply chain.
Honeywell Process Solutions held its annual HUG (Honeywell User Group) conference the week of June 19 in Orlando. I’ve taken some time to compile my many notes and think about the experience.
The marketing communications staff did an excellent job with media and analysts. We did not have time to waste what with presentations and 1:1 conversations.
I had not attended for a few years. For maybe three years I was in the influencer program with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HPE Discover is the same week. That program was disbanded a year or so ago. That marked the end of my IT affiliations. Those companies figured out there was not a lot of money to be made in manufacturing.
There were many questions begging for answers as I traveled to Florida. What was Honeywell HIVE, and how does it relate to the ExxonMobil initiated Open Process Automation group? What is Honeywell Digital Prime and what customer problems does it address? What successes have Honeywell achieved with sustainability initiatives? Honeywell was an early mobility developer. What has progressed in that regard? What role does Honeywell see for AR and VR?
Pramesh Makeshwari, CEO
He mentioned he’d been CEO of this group for only about nine months. Here are a few points of overview.
Honeywell is not replacing people with technology but helping them perform better
People have different learning styles and Honeywell products adapt to them
Digitalization is a significant customer requirement
Companies are on the Path to Net Zero Carbon
Focus on Digital Workforce Competency
Evan Van Hook, Chief Sustainability Officer
He looks at sustainability as similar to the Quality Revolution where the goal was to produce quality outputs consistently creating a culture of quality. His question, “Can we create culture of sustainability?” Honeywell is taking a Lean approach—quality, delivery, inventory, cost, then add sustainability.
Lean is a systematic approach. The company overall has generated more than 6,500 projects over 13 years with ideas coming from the floor and everywhere else. Not a political statement, sustainability cuts costs and adds efficiency. A few milestone points:
92% reduction of CO2
70% improvement in energy efficiency
Restored 3,000 acres of land
Water savings
4x industry average safety
Act your way into a new way of thinking—Lean—put sustainability into Lean
Tiffany Barnes – Digital Prime
I perhaps had the most difficulty understanding Digital Prime. This is the Honeywell offering responding to the customer need for digital transformation. So, the conversation with Tiffany Barnes from that group was most instructive. Part of my cognitive dissonance perhaps came from this being a new offering only having one part released.
Digital Prime is most easily described as cloud-hosted digital twin of DCS. Some of the customer pressures Digital Prime addresses include:
Risk of disruption, production downtime and plant safety
Pressure to reduce overall lifecycle cost
Do more with less through digitalization
Data overload
Reduced skilled workforce onsite
It is perhaps an irony that Honeywell build a virtual infrastructure to help with system acceptance then deleting it upon that acceptance. Customers began looking at digital transformation programs and realized that all this data Honeywell had was useful. This grew to a digital twin.
Honeywell’s Digital Prime is the up-to-date digital twin for tracking, managing, and testing process control changes and system modifications. It brings the highest level of quality control to the smallest projects: An efficient, compliant, and collaborative solution for managing changes, factory acceptance tests, improved project execution and training.
Providing secure cloud-based connectivity and a virtual engineering platform, it’s a collaborative environment for managing and testing additions, patches, upgrades and other system changes:
Enabling functional reviews and impact analysis
Supporting remote FAT tests
Providing a training tool
Documenting digital changes.
Joe Bastone — HIVE
Veteran editors and analysts were most curious about any Honeywell response to the initiatives undertaken by The Open Group to solve problems of economically and efficiently upgrading control systems.
This led to my intense interest in Honeywell HIVE and a subsequent conversation with Joe Bastone.
The problem lies with traditionally tightly coupled control hardware, software, and I/O.
Honeywell mostly solved the I/O problem years ago with its configurable I/O. That part of the control system continues to evolve.
The company then worked with a major customer about how to upgrade control software with minimal disruption. First, they worked out how to move the existing control software to a modern hardware platform leaving all the I/O in place. They realized that was in reality a form of virtualization. Moving to a virtualized compute environment effectively decoupling hardware and software was the obvious next step. Their I/O was already virtualized and decoupled.
So, Honeywell HIVE solves that upgrade problem that customers are searching for.
Thanks to Joe for walking me through the technology evolution.
Sarang Gadre — Battery Technology
The well documented issue with intermittent renewables (solar, wind) results from the laws of climate—the wind does not always blow and the sun does not always shine. Honeywell has had a commercial battery storage product for a while. It is housed in shipping containers. Introduced to us at HUG is the Ionic—a scalable, forklift-able, virtual power plant, with an energy control center in Experion. It is battery agnostic—you specify and buy your batteries of choice. The unit also features peak load shaving.
Naved Reza—Carbon Capture
I always enjoy conversations with Naved regarding sustainable technology solutions.
First up was reference to the ExxonMobil Baytown deployment of one of Honeywell’s carbon capture technologies – Honeywell’s CO2 Fractionation and Hydrogen Purification System. This technology is expected to enable ExxonMobil to capture about 7 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per year, the equivalent of the emission of 1.5 million of automobiles for one year.
Then we discussed Honeywell Ecofining—Renewable Fuel projects such as Diesel/Aircraft from biofuels. Also Ethanol to Jet and Methanol to Jet.
Aside from Baytown, there are a number of Carbon Capture (CO2) to blue hydrogen, renewable green, low carbon processing.
Manas Dutta — SafetyWatch Mobility
Performing maintenance on a pump involves an average of 3.5 round trips for the technician. Using augmented reality (AR) platforms can save many hour by providing the right documentation and required tools up front.
I made this trip closely following both the Apple Vision Pro announcement along with all the AI chat hype. So I had to ask Manas for his take from the industrial viewpoint.
“AR/VR are excellent for training especially as individualized based on AI feedback. AR/VR can also be useful for construction. When planning turnarounds, I can answer questions such as can I get a crane in, do I need scaffolding, without a visit remote site.”
