Condition Monitoring: A Paradigm of Industry 4.0
What is Condition Monitoring?
Condition monitoring is a technique for tracking a machine’s health as well as performance over time. With condition monitoring, manufacturers can estimate parameters such as temperature, current, vibration, and RPM against set thresholds to rectify degradation signs. According to the Analyst firm Aberdeen Research, 82% of companies have faced unplanned downtime over the past three years. This unplanned downtime in manufacturing can cost a company about $260,000 an hour.
Traditional calendar-based strategy is not only expensive and time-consuming but also may cause failure by disrupting the equilibrium of stable assets.
Why it is Important?
Analyze real-time machine diagnosis and conditions so you can perform maintenance at the right time to prevent unexpected, expensive downtime and machine damage. Condition monitoring is essential to lean manufacturing facilities because it minimizes downtime, improves production efficiency, and helps with cost prediction, and maintenance requirements.
This drives a variety of significant KPIs, including machine uptime, utilization, and OEE. We can say that condition monitoring is a more evolved form of machine monitoring, utilizing helpful machine data to take benefit the midline between calendar-based maintenance and reactive maintenance.
CONNECT TO ANY MACHINE
Connect, assemble and visualize machine condition data from any part or piece of equipment and machine on the shop floor.
MONITOR MACHINE HEALTH
Identify concerns with real-time visualizations & analytics on the health of machines through production data
TAKE ACTION
Keep machines running with optimized maintenance alerts, driven by KPls, machine alarms & condition thresholds
ADVANCED MACHINE ANALYTICS
Monitor machine control and sensor data to avoid unplanned downtime. Visualize this data in real-time to notice previously invisible aspects of machine conditions on the shop floor. View and export real-time machine data, alarms and charts to identify and resolve concerns
CONDITION MONITORING
View and monitor the status and health of your machine assets, and take necessary preventive actions
REMOTE MONITORING
The advancement of the lloT has made it easy to monitor machine conditions without being physically present during uptime.
ALERTS & NOTIFICATIONS
Alert the right person at the right time when an action requires to be taken. Track incidents via a workflow with reassignment, and full audit tracking.
How is the Condition Monitoring System Implemented
Executing a Condition Monitoring solution means much more than just utilizing new test instruments. It means moving up for a culture shift: from Preventive Maintenance to Predictive Maintenance. It begins with management vision and needs investments on multiple fronts: from equipping the right equipment to training technicians to operate investigative work based on data points and taking constant and timely actions across the organization, to get all the benefits of Condition Monitoring.
Implementing a Successful Condition Monitoring Solution Needs:
1. Recognizing critical assets that require to be analyzed for potential risks related to their operation.
2. Gathering real-time monitored Data with the same test instruments measuring the same batch of attributes
3. Training technicians to simplify and report Condition Monitoring data
4. Recognizing the corrective actions to be taken when Condition Monitoring data specify abnormalities
Eventually, this solution predicts the findings of condition data and sends alerts and notifications when the situation differs from the norm.
What Conditions can you Analyze?
Because condition monitoring is used in a wide range of settings, it is a very useful tool. Machine condition data is then monitored to have a better understanding of machine health and to take quick action if any variable indicates that the machine is about to fail. Some of the conditions that are examined to correct trends, forecast breakdowns, and trigger condition-based maintenance operations are listed below:
Current and Voltage: Many manufacturers calculate the current and voltage going through their transformers to interpret how efficiently their assets utilize energy, and track and visualize parameters of machine conditions in real-time.
Tool Failure: With a condition monitoring solution employed, you can not only rectify when a tool breaks but even estimate when a tool failure is impending. With this, you can deploy preventive maintenance to resolve the concern before it ever occurs.
Temperature: Monitoring machine temperature can alert facility employees of an impending machine failure or even health threats such as huge machine breaks or even fires in some hostile manufacturing environments.
Vibration Monitoring: Manufacturers calculate vibration to ensure that spinning components are correctly balanced and aren’t causing assets to fail prematurely.
Advantages of Condition Monitoring Solutions:
Here are a few of the benefits that manufacturing industries can get from the data gathered through condition monitoring solutions, that are collectively powering the Industry 4.0 revolution:
1. Improvements in Product Design
2. New product development
3. Improve production output via outage prevention
4. Planning as well as implementing smart maintenance
5. Minimize maintenance costs via effective incident management
6. Expand the lifespan of the equipment via machine condition monitoring
7. Optimize inventory of spares by extending equipment life
8. Concentrate on maintaining safety by avoiding serious malfunctions which can lead to serious environmental catastrophe along with legal and financial fallout
Condition-based maintenance is definitely beneficial to a manufacturer’s bottom line as compared to a reactive maintenance strategy that solves machine problems only after they break.
Though, moving toward a predictive maintenance strategy is even more effective and cost-effective for data-savvy manufacturers. Industry 4.0 and the Internet of things will continue to drive the way Condition Monitoring technologies are developed. Condition Monitoring will remain at the cutting edge of fault diagnosis.