What the Sensors Can Tell Us
The dream of every production line manager: Repair or replace equipment before it fails. Does this belong to the realm of prophecy? No. What you need are sensors that collect data, a network to forward them to, an intelligent algorithm to analyze the data and a visualization dashboard that is easy to read.
This is exactly what Leadec experts are currently implementing. Jitendra Singh, Head of Business Development for Leadec India, talks about their projects: “We have started online vibration monitoring in paint shops, and the results are promising. It can be used on all rotating equipment – we worked on the blowers and we have tried it successfully on overhead electric overhead travelling cranes. We now have concluded a proof of concept with customers in different industries and are working on transferring that into a new service offering for maintenance.” The idea is to commit to a certain equipment reliability with Service Level Agreement contracts.
Understanding data
At an engine production site in Germany, Nico Schrickel, site manager at Leadec, has installed vibration sensors to the pumps at several machining centers. “These pumps have had seven failures per year, mostly due to hard particle contamination.” Schrickel takes advantage of Leadec’s own IoT Home Cloud to collect and evaluate the data from the sensors. “We expect to predict the failure of the pumps, and then we can reduce the maintenance effort for such equipment by 70%. We can save money on spare parts and we increase equipment availability by avoiding downtime” adds his colleague Angelo Urias from Product Management. Currently they are following the vibration data trending and waiting for the pumps to stop. Statistically, a critical failure should happen until April. Then they have proven their point.
