Want Your Machines To Live Longer? Monitor Its Lifestyle
If we look at human society, some of us live beyond 90 whereas many productive individuals die prematurely before 50, either due to heart attack or cancer. Most of us tend to believe (rightfully so looking at the large number of surveys that have been published), the longevity of human life is a result of their healthy lifestyle. They eat unadulterated quality food, never deprive themselves of a good eight-hour sleep and drink a lot of clean water to keep their kidney healthy.
However, when it comes to machines, premature death is always blamed on the manufacturer. Despite the fact, and it’s very common, that two identical machines of same brand and same batch may have two entirely different life cycles! One may break down before completing the first year, while the other may have to be decommissioned after 20 years of sustained good health! When it is about machines, we never suspect what kind of lifestyle they have been subjected to and what is the consequence of a rogue lifestyle.
At MachineSense, we believe we have to understand a machine and its lifestyle the very same way we understand our lifestyle. Machinesense Industrial 4.0 sensor systems are all about understanding the lifestyle of Machines 24x7.
Lifestyle starts with unadulterated good food. Machines are fed on electrical power. It needs quality power or else its motors will break down sooner than estimated. Electrical line can be adulterated with high level of harmonics, phase imbalance and ground noise. Each of them can kill the motor of the machine. With the advent of vector drives (VFDs), killing level of harmonics are more ubiquitous than before inside the factory. MachineSense Power Analyzer is a unique product which will track not only bad power quality, it will also do energy management & optimization and productivity tracking. Furthermore, it will keep track of the motor bearing and stator winding health.
The next important step of a human lifestyle is making sure you are not operated beyond what you have been designed to tolerate. Like all human beings need eight hours of sleep and can’t endure physically beyond a limit, Machines have their limit too and more often than not they are abused in the field by inexperienced operators. We do see this a lot in Vacuum Pump products where a pump may be operated at extreme upper limit and thus its blower will break down much sooner. Machinesense Pump Analyzer and Component Analyzer track this kind of abuse by looking at vibration patterns.
The third critical step to good lifestyle is cleaning your filter. The kidney is the filter for us humans and we need to drink sufficient amount of water every day to keep it clean. If we don’t clean our kidney, not only do we risk damaging the kidney, the unclean blood and water in our body becomes the source of all kinds of diseases. Similarly, if air or oil filter of the machines are not cleaned on a regular basis, adulterated air will kill many machine components. Machinesense is developing a FilterSense solution (it is already available as a part of PumpSense for pump products) to track filters of any machine, as its regular maintenance is critical for a healthy lifestyle of the machine. If the filters are not maintained regularly, maintenance crews will receive emails and texts from the machines!
Machinesense Industrial 4.0 products are not only about just a few analytics, but the way results are displayed in mobile apps, or texts/emails are sent – an awareness for better maintenance in the factory. Everyone will hear the cry of the machine when it is subjected to abuse either by adulterated power or poor maintenance or by bad operation.
