Background
Worthington Cylinders is a subsidiary of the international Worthington Industries Group. Founded in 1817 and based in Kienberg near Gaming, Austria, Worthington Cylinders is a centre of excellence for seamless high pressure steel cylinders. With more than 400 employees, the company develops and produces high quality pressure vessels for worldwide use in the industrial gas-, medicine- and automotive sector. The company produces more than 600,000 steel cylinders and achieves an annual turnover of around 80 million euros. Worthington products meet the highest safety and quality standards and are exported to more than 90 countries.
Challenge
With the help of experts and innovators, Worthington would like to solve a tricky, technical question: What does the smart Worthington steel cylinder of the future look like?
Currently, their main business is the manufacture and sale of seamless high pressure steel cylinders (B2B). In order to create added value for their customers, Worthington would like to broaden their scope in the area of services and offer a holistic package. One option to come closer to this goal is to trace their cylinders in order to generate and analyse consumer behaviour and ensure data transparency. Consequently, their products need to be equipped with appropriate sensory technology. Usually, Worthington's cylinders leave their plant with neck ring and valve, sometimes protection caps are mounted. It is crucial to understand that Worthington can only manipulate the cylinder and the neckring since all other components are provided by the customer.
Sub-questions:
- How and where can sensory technology be integrated into the product?
- Data to be collected: filling level, temperatures (environment, surface, content, etc.), location, number of cycles, position (horizontal, vertical), etc.
- Which additional data can/should be collected?
- How can Worthington ensure that the collected data is transmitted promptly to a server and that the steel cylinder can be identified in defined areas? (Possible technologies: BLE, LoRa, GSM, etc.)
- How can the energy supply of the sensory part be guaranteed?
- How does the quality (tensile strength, etc.) of the steel cylinder change over its lifetime (50 years)? Which forecasts can be created?
What's in it for you?
The goal is to obtain solutions on how sensory components can be integrated on/into Worthington's product to ensure traceability. It is particularly important that there are no boundaries set regarding technical design in order to guarantee the creation of an expandable system.
A successful collaboration could mean, for individuals, becoming part of the wider Worthington Industries group, while for organisations, collaborate, co-develop and co-launch the idea to market.
This is a global challenge and Worthington Industries are willing to collaborate with both individuals/freelancers and other industry participants/universities etc. and solutions can be at any stage of development.
If you have or are developing solutions, or if you have expertise in the above, please click "Apply" to submit your solution/expertise to the Network.