Helping the Industry in the 4.0 Era

Mailhot Industries has been a leader in the cylinder market since 1956. The company stands out from the competition thanks to the quality of its innovation-based products. Mailhot Industries manufactures nearly 50,000 cylinders annually for various types of vehicles in the environmental and waste management, natural resource exploitation, construction, and snow removal markets. In particular, the company aims to grow in the mining market.

Recently, Mailhot Industries developed, in conjunction with the Novika, the college centre for technology transfer (CCTT) in La Pocatière, a cylinder rod laser texturing process. They called on INO to add advanced functions to make their cylinders intelligent, and to allow them to be integrated into automated systems.

We are in the process of developing a sensor capable of reading a cylinder’s current position, with the aim of making it intelligent. The system must be based on a method used to encode the positions, integrate a position reading system that meets the requirements, and ideally be able to determine the cylinder’s level of wear for predictive purposes. The sensor must be integrated into or located near the cylinder head.

The INO-Mailhot partnership is in full swing. Development is divided into a series of phases leading to the production of intelligent cylinders. The first phase consisted of an overview of possible optical techniques for encoding and reading the absolute position.

This feasibility study made it possible to target the method tested in the lab during the second phase in order to validate its ability to accurately indicate the absolute position. A third phase served to prove the concept in a lab simulating actual operating conditions. What follows will make it possible to design and test more mature prototypes in a real environment, and then to initiate production.

Our partnership with Mailhot will, without a doubt, allow the INO team to go further thanks to artificial intelligence!