Beckhoff UK was a gold sponsor at LabVIEW technical event GDevCON. Here, technical support engineer Chris Knight explains the vital function that inputs and outputs (I/O) communication plays in connecting systems, exchanging data and ensuring efficient automation.

With an aging workforce and a lack of younger people entering the industry, it’s clear that the UK’s manufacturing sector will face an ongoing shortage of workers. Embracing technologies like generative AI could go some way in overcoming it, as Stephen Hayes, managing director of Beckhoff UK explains.

As the food supply chain undergoes modernisation and calls for heightened transparency in food safety grow louder, food manufacturers find themselves facing the need to embrace digitalisation. According to Ian Scott-Mance, technology manager at Mettler-Toledo Product Inspection, rather than viewing this as a challenge, they should perceive it as a strategic opportunity to unlock significant value for their businesses.

Food processing plants typically run their equipment for 16 to 20 hours a day, yet a Forbes report claims that manufacturers face an average of 15 hours downtime per week. Tom Cash, director of Siemens parts supplier, Foxmere, explains how the role of condition-based maintenance (CBM) helps maintenance engineers recognise gross defects before catastrophe strikes.

For manufacturers, keeping a close eye on their Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) numbers, the last thing they want is unscheduled downtime messing things up. Kati Hope, global account manager of Mettler-Toledo Product Inspection, shares information on how picking the right product inspection system can be a game-changer for keeping the production line humming and decreasing spend for food manufacturers.

In the simplest terms, a heat exchanger is like a radiator, designed to heat (or cool) one material from another. However, over the last 150 years or so, a wide variety of types and designs have emerged, meaning that finding the most suitable type of heat exchanger for your application is not always simple. Matt Hale, international sales and marketing director at HRS Heat Exchangers, looks at the considerations for choosing the right heat exchanger for food processing applications.

Whether syrups and flavourings for beer or soda, low flow flowmeters are required to dose these concentrated fluids at the end process, dispensing the precise amount of liquid to the correct dilution. However, the smaller the flow, the trickier it is to control and measure, and finding a suitable flow measuring technology at reasonable cost can prove challenging for both users and flow sensor manufacturers, as the experts at Titan Enterprises explain.

Factory real estate prices are on the rise, ingredient and overhead costs are escalating, and food safety regulations are becoming stricter. Jodie Curry, commercial manager at Fortress Technology Europe, highlights the benefits of optimising food production facilities using space-saving, smaller-footprint inspection solutions.

Patricia Torres, industry marketing manager for food and commodities solutions at OMRON Industrial Automation Europe, explores how to make FMCG manufacturing more sustainable through intelligent energy management.

Phil Brown, managing director at Fortress Technology Europe examines the benefits of having a longer-term strategic investment plan; the hidden and frequently overlooked risks on pre-prepared food processing lines; ways to prevent, eliminate or reduce microbiological, hygiene and physical contaminants; and how to spread machinery inspection assets out across production lines so there are no HACCP-holes.