Condition-based maintenance – helping to reduce your costs
Remotely monitor your equipment and cut the costs of your maintenance
Condition-based maintenance uses data from sensors in your equipment to monitor it in near real-time. This monitoring ensures warning signs are recognized, alerts are created, and maintenance is triggered when it is necessary. This technology means that maintenance will be carried out at the right time. In other words, not too early and definitely not too late.
Now more than ever before, the cost of a maintenance visit eats up a major amount of the maintenance budgets of many companies. With increasing fuel costs and higher salaries, it is really important to offer remote access to sensor data in order to monitor the performance of your equipment that is being used by your customers.
Vast potential & benefits
Unfortunately, the reality is that time-based maintenance doesn’t take into account the real condition of your products. This means that interventions get scheduled at standard intervals – regardless of whether there is a need for maintenance or not. Clearly, this leads to inefficient maintenance planning. And if that’s not bad enough, even worse situations happen if emergency repairs are required before the planned maintenance takes place. This results in extra costs, stress, and dissatisfied customers.
Today’s electronic processing techniques allow the user to apply Edge Computing to the sensor and device data. Edge Computing performs pre-processing of the data to monitor divergent behavior, analyze trends, and trigger alerts. This means the need to transfer significant data to the cloud is reduced.
Implementation
With a clear focus on custom-made controllers, Psicontrol has considerable expertise when it comes to designing electronics that process internal and external sensor data to steer and control several actuators for valves, motors, etc. to ensure reliable device operations.
To enable condition-based maintenance, extra signals are added to monitor the device condition and detect divergent behavior. Temperature or inrush current increase could indicate higher bearing friction, while a pressure drop could suggest obstructed or leaking tubes – these are initial signals of latent production breakdown.
The success of condition-based maintenance relies on the quality and reliability of these device data. Psicontrol implements a range of different techniques to create useful, reliable, and secure sensor data for you to act upon:
- Sensor signal calibration for stable readouts
- Signal conditioning to eliminate noise and optimize the signal-to-noise ratio
- Edge computing will reduce the volume of data sent to the cloud
- Trend analysis to generate alarms, and provide trend info
- Embedded security to guarantee tamper-free authentic data transfer to your back office
- IoT connection through NBioT/3G/4G/Wi-Fi, etc.
Want to find out more?
If you’re interested in learning more about what Psicontrol can do for you, please don’t hesitate to contact us!