A coating failure is discovered after paint. The cause happened in tank four.
Phosphating and pretreatment lines fail quietly — a bath two degrees cool, a carrier three seconds fast, a heater ageing. Everything downstream inherits the defect. MachineWise records every tank, every dwell and every batch, so a coating result can be traced back to the conditions that produced it.
The process is chemistry, time and temperature. Two of the three are usually unrecorded.
The conveyor decides your coating weight
Immersion time is set by carrier speed, and carrier speed drifts with load, chain wear and operator override. A ninety-second dip that quietly became seventy-two seconds is a coating-weight problem nobody logged.
Within range is not within spec
Phosphating baths have narrow effective windows. A tank that spends the first hour of the shift climbing to temperature produces different parts from the ones made at eleven o'clock — and the log sheet says the same number for both.
Defects surface days later
Poor adhesion is found at paint inspection, at assembly, or at the customer. By then the line has run three shifts. Without recorded bath conditions per carrier, root cause is a guess and containment is the whole week's output.
Every tank on the same timeline.
Thermocouples and level sensors wire into our Gateway; conveyor position and carrier ID come from the line PLC over Modbus or from a QR scan at load. What you get is one continuous record of what each batch actually experienced.
Bath temperature, dwell time and heater duty cycle. Cold degrease is the most common upstream cause of downstream coating failure.
Overflow and temperature logging, plus dwell. Carryover from a starved rinse contaminates the next tank and shortens bath life.
Temperature and immersion time recorded per carrier, with alerts when either falls outside the window you define.
Short-dwell, high-sensitivity stage — timing variance here shows up directly in crystal size and coating uniformity.
The critical tank: continuous temperature trending against the effective window, dwell per carrier, heater performance, and time-at-temperature rather than a spot reading.
Temperature and dwell logged, with DI conductivity where instrumented.
Zone temperatures and belt speed — the last chance to catch a thermal problem before paint.
Traceability that answers the customer's question.
Conditions bound to a lot number
Every carrier or batch carries its own record: which tanks, what temperature, how long in each, which shift and which operator. Retrievable by lot number years later.
Scope a problem in minutes
When a coating defect appears, query which batches passed through the tank while it was out of window. Suspect lots are a list, not the entire week's production.
Evidence for IATF and customer audits
Auto-recorded process parameters are exactly what a process audit asks to see. No transcription, no gaps at shift change, no handwriting to interpret.
The equipment that stops a pretreatment line.
It is rarely the chemistry that halts the line — it is a circulation pump, an agitator or a heater. Those are rotating and thermal assets, which is exactly what our condition monitoring was built for.
Circulation pumps
Vibration and current signatures give 48–96 hours of warning on bearing and impeller wear.
Heaters & elements
Rising time-to-temperature is a measurable index of element ageing and scale build-up.
Conveyor drive
Chain drive load and speed variance predict jams — the failure that strands parts in a bath.
Energy per tank
Heating is the dominant cost. Per-tank kWh exposes weekend holds and over-heated baths.
Instrument one pretreatment line, free, for thirty days.
Two tanks and the conveyor is enough to show you dwell-time variance and thermal drift you are not currently seeing.
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