Catching Scrap Early in Battery Gigafactories
Why cell plants still scrap 15-30% of early output, and how inline measurement and cell genealogy move defect detection from the gate back to the coater.
Zoniax · Archive
Field Notes · Page 3
Field notes on industrial operations intelligence — sensors, edge telemetry, and machine learning for processing plants.
The Asset Administration Shell Gets a Deadline
Industry 4.0's standardized digital twin was optional for a decade. EU product law just made it a market-access requirement.
MQTT, Sparkplug B, and the Unified Namespace
How one MQTT broker, the Sparkplug state model, and an ISA-95 topic tree replace a plant's point-to-point integration sprawl.
The EU AI Act on the Plant Floor
Who counts as a deployer, when plant AI is high-risk, and the deadlines that land on the factory floor.
Agentic AI on the Plant Floor: What the Demos Skip
Six claims that ride in on the agentic AI procurement deck, and why each one breaks against a deterministic control room.
Industrial Data Governance: Owning OT Data
Who owns the data your machines produce, who may see it, and how to keep it trustworthy from the sensor to the boardroom.
Energy per Tonne: Benchmarking Specific Energy Use
Why specific energy consumption is the metric that actually exposes plant efficiency, and how to benchmark it without lying to yourself.
Cold Chain Monitoring: 5 Myths That Cost Product
Five things vendors and managers get wrong about cold chain temperature monitoring, and what actually catches an excursion in time.
Industrial AI in Food & Beverage: Yield, Uptime, Quality
Where machine vision, soft sensors, and predictive maintenance actually have to run on a regulated production line.
Digital Twins in Process Plants: Where They Pay Off
Telling a synchronized twin from a dashboard, and a four-line test for whether a process plant should build one.
Computer-Vision Scrap Sorting: Cleaner Charge, Less Copper
Cameras grade scrap by sight, but it takes spectroscopy to read the copper that wrecks a heat, and a control loop to act before the grab closes.
NIS2 for Industrial Operators: What EU Plants Must Do
How the EU's NIS2 directive turns into concrete OT controls on a processing plant floor, built in the order that actually works.