Customer Success Story
No Expert Knowledge Required for a Digital Solution
At a leading Thailand food and beverage company, machines run around the clock. To gain more knowledge about the condition of the highly stressed conveyor belt motors of the labeling machines and to avoid unplanned downtime of them, the plant‘s maintenance department was looking for a predictive Condition Monitoring solution. The customer decided to go with the Condition Monitoring solution SmartCheck, which now replaces offline Condition
Monitoring.
Savings from 5 prevented failures: > 20,000 euros.
Benefits
Customer benefit
Safe Condition Monitoring in real time with Smart Utility Software
Less unplanned downtime
Early detection of bearing defects
Easy to understand data for decision making
Better planning of resources and stock
Challenge
Food supplements are produced in one of the food manufacturer‘s numerous plants. The machines run around the clock to meet the high global demand for the product. The utilization of all the machines involved in the process is high. To avoid unplanned downtime, offline manual measuring devices were previously used. However, this monitoring method only gave maintenance the current status at the time of measurement. This was not enough for the maintenance department, especially because the motors on the conveyor belts of the labelling machines often failed unplanned. This mainly affected the motors at the infeed and outfeed of the conveyor belts, as well as the servo motor that triggers the process for cold gluing.
In order to guarantee optimal operating time, the maintenance department was looking for a monitoring solution that would detect an impending failure at an early stage and issue warning messages. With this request, the maintenance department turned to Schaeffler.
Solution
Schaeffler‘s experts recommended the Condition Monitoring solution with SmartCheck. The robust monitoring system detects deviations and changes in vibration behavior. Bearing damage is thus detected at an early stage, which can prevent an unplanned shutdown.
A total of six SmartChecks were used on the servo motor and the conveyor motors. In this case, the data is gathered via a SmartController. The solution is visualised on the computer with the SmartVisual analysis software. In the control room, maintenance can thus track the status of the machines at any time and take action if necessary.
In this way, faults can be tracked with array alarm learning. SCADA programming was implemented to avoid faults from different sources. The data is exchanged with higher management levels via TCP/IP,SLMP.
