Smart condition monitoring increases productivity
22/10/2019
Muntons, a UK producer of malted barley, is protecting vital parts of its production process against unscheduled downtime by using the smart condition monitoring (SCM) system from Mitsubishi Electric.As in many areas of the food industry, the principles of the barley malting process are quite traditional, but Muntons relies heavily on automation, electromechanical equipment and sensors to provide fine control over air flow, heat and moisture. Fans and motors are critical to the operation: Muntons processes many tonnes of product at a time, with key operations relying on a steady supply of blown air. The chosen SCM installation provides condition monitoring for two large 315 kW fan sets and a single 90 kW fan set. Sensors monitor the electric motor, power transmission coupling and main fan shaft bearing on each fan set.
The impetus for the SCM installation came from issues previously experienced with difficult-to-reach bearings inside a large fan housing. A bearing failure inside a fan assembly caught the Muntons engineering team off guard and proved significant in terms of downtime.
“We only realised we had problems when it was too late and we had to make an unscheduled stop on one of the lines to make repairs,” said Michael Plawecki, Plant Engineer at Muntons.
Determined to learn from this lesson, Muntons looked for a monitoring solution with predictive maintenance technology that could be linked into the company’s existing supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system. Its requirement was for a system that would provide the maximum forewarning of any problems, yet would be quick and easy to install.
The SCM solution provided by Mitsubishi Electric comprises smart sensors that can be attached to bearing housings, gearboxes, pumps and motors to detect when equipment starts to operate outside its normal envelope due to wear. It provides a sophisticated early warning system for critical pieces of rotating plant equipment. Vibration frequencies and temperature readouts are monitored continuously and fed back to an L-series Mitsubishi Electric programmable logic controller (PLC) via an industrial Ethernet network cable.
The PLC offers simple integration to the hardware and software platforms of other network systems, in this case integrating seamlessly with the SCADA system at Muntons.
With the SCM installed on the three fan sets, the Muntons engineering team is now looking at the potential for using smart conditioning monitoring elsewhere in the plant.
