Power Quality Audit

Energy auditing and recommendation for energy saving is still rudimentary. Most of the auditors are using Fluke like meter or downloading a CSV file from Smart meter connected to the server. Then they either have proprietary software or Excel Macros to look at some common aspects - such as "Turn-ON", "Turn-OFF" habits, Power Factor, compare warmer vs colder days, etc. Basically, a few tricks, rules, patterns they have learned to save energy. But they are very ill-equipped when you look at the overall potential to save energy: 1. Fluke and other common energy meters that can store the data for...

  In my years of experience, I have found four common yet major issues in after sales service and support for engineering products and services….  1.      The first and foremost issue that comes to mind is….did the product fit the specs? This is a major concern everywhere if the product is not custom made. This usually occurs when engineers guesstimate the specs that are not always accurate. Very often products are purchased which are not optimized for the application. So, the obvious question is….how we do ascertain if the fit is good? One prime example, that I can think of, is...

Vibration analysis of machines, specially rotor, is nothing new. By 1995, as computers with 1GB+RAM became available in the market, FFT based vibration analysis became popular as harmonics of vibration signature could identify a particular bearing defect or a gearbox defect. Over time, this method became popular and experts who understood FFT signature of machine failure, started advising on the maintenance issues all over the manufacturing Industry.With the advent of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) , couple of start-ups like Augery and Petasense, tried to automate this process via cloud so that machines could be monitored 24x7.However, there is a...

2018 marked the year of edge computing in IoT world.  Satya Nadela, CEO of Microsoft sent a memo to all Microsoft employees, emphasizing why edge computing and edge cloud were going to be vital to success going ahead. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, also emphasized the emerging role of edge computing in the Google I/O conference in May 2018. Siemens and Microsoft delivered a joint demonstration of Edge Cloud capability at Hannover Messe in April this year.  What is Edge Computing?  Edge computing technique makes IIoT-based predictive maintenance more efficient and effective. Here the analytics is done close to the...

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,...