Conveyor health monitoring solution launched
12/11/2019
Future Fibre Technologies (FFT), a business within the technology division of Ava Risk Group, has released its new Aura IQ solution for conveyor health monitoring.The company states that the solution could revolutionise conveyor health monitoring by using real-time data to optimise production and on-site performance, enhance occupational health, hygiene and safety management and introduce exciting new predictive maintenance and support capabilities to asset management.
Ava Group signed a development and commercialisation agreement with Mining3 in February, which facilitated the launch. Having successfully completed surface and subsurface testing with some of the world’s largest mining houses and bulk material handling facilities, Aura IQ is now available for sale
globally.
Conveyor systems play a crucial role in underpinning efficiency, and ultimately profitability, in bulk handling operations globally. Conveyor maintenance has traditionally been a real problem, with conventional methods of advanced conveyor failure detection often unreliable, subjective, time consuming and labour intensive.
Aura IQ’s technology harnesses the power of FFT’s fibre-optic detection and sensing technology platform (FFT Aura Ai-2) and is combined with development partner Mining3’s advanced signal processing algorithms and predictive analytics to acoustically monitor and assess conveyor health via cloud-based analysis, reporting and alerts.
Providing deeper insights to maintenance technicians, site personnel, regional operational hubs and global headquarters, conveyors are automatically connected to the cloud via an industrial-grade wireless Internet of Things (IoT) gateway, enabling daily asset reliability reports from every conveyor and at every site around the world.
By transmitting a series of short laser pulses along a single fibre-optic cable retrofitted along the length of a conveyor, acoustic disturbances from the conveyor system cause microscopic changes in the backscattered laser light, which is then categorised into known parameters.
Data is then simultaneously gathered from every metre of the conveyor and processed by Aura IQ to pre-emptively alert operators, either on or off site (in operational hubs or control rooms), to potential failures before they happen.
This includes:
- Detecting a broken ball or a cracked cage in a ball race;
- Observing and tracking idler bearings as they progressively wear; and
- Predicting potential bearing seizures and prioritising roller replacements at the next maintenance shutdown.
