Manufacturing environments includes a wide variety of different activities and processes, but all sharing a general pressure to create products, in the right quantity, to the required quality, at the right time, at minimum cost.
Condition-Based Maintenance is a valuable strategy to minimise both maintenance costs and the knock-on business costs of disruption that arise from unexpected downtime. MBVI systems have a wide applicability in this sector.
Most manufacturing environments share one or more or sometimes of these pressures:
- Low cost operation is vital
- Unplanned downtime is costly and disruptive, with potential impacts on product quality if the process is disrupted
- Timely delivery schedules are vital to meet customers’ requirements, with penalties for failure to meet them consistently
- Highly competitive supply contracts can punish those who can’t keep to the delivery schedules, on time, to quality and within tight cost constraints
- All of these put ever increasing pressure on manufacturing equipment performing reliably and efficiently
- So condition monitoring can have a significant impact on business performance, by avoiding unplanned production stoppages and quality problems
Many manufacturing plants, particularly multi-product plants, have relatively short batch or campaign run times, with periods in between where the plant is stopped. This is an ideal environment for condition monitoring and condition-based maintenance, where corrective action identified by the condition monitoring equipment can be scheduled into periods where the plant is due to be shut down anyway, with zero disruption to production.
Many manufacturing sites are quite extensive, making fixed installations of conventional condition monitoring technologies like Vibration Monitoring expensive because the spread-out layout of the plant leads to high cabling costs. Battery powered Wireless typically has short battery life in the maze of equipment and steelwork that are present in many manufacturing plant locations
Case studies in manufacturing
Manufacturing industry uses a wide range of varied equipment, some of which can be extremely difficult to monitor. This case study is of a horizontal axis, centrifugal decanter, used to separate fine solids from process fluid.
It comprises two co-axial shafts, one running inside the other, with intermediate bearings between the two, and driven by two separate motors, one from each end, both of variable speed, creating a major headache for many conventional condition monitoring systems, and on which the Faraday Predictive system provided useful new insights.
What to do next
If you are interested in applying Faraday Predictive condition monitoring systems to your plant, give us a call on 0333 772 0748, or email us on info@faradaypredictive.com.
If you want to develop your business case for investment in Faraday Predictive condition monitoring systems, take a look at our benefits calculator.