Platform for the food and beverage industry
Predictive maintenance is the systematic continuation of condition-based maintenance with the goal of proactively maintaining machines and plants and detecting changes, reducing downtime and increasing the efficiency of the entire plant. Condition-based maintenance replaces traditional time-based maintenance.
Especially for drive systems in demanding production environments, where industrial gear units are typically used in critical applications and their failure can cause serious damage, such as in intralogistics, the food industry or the heavy duty sector, condition monitoring complements the triad of gear unit, electric motor and frequency inverter with improved safety and reliability. This is where condition monitoring for predictive maintenance comes in: based on intelligent algorithms and software in an IIoT environment, the networked drive units can collect their condition data in the PLC of the inverter and preprocess it together with data from connected sensors and actuators. The result of the preprocessing, or the complete data set, can optionally be transmitted to a peripheral device. There the data from all subsystems are managed and evaluated. The data is then available as preselected and processed smart data for further use and clear visualization.
A concrete application example is the sensorless determination of the optimal time for oil change based on oil temperature. This is based on the fact that oil temperature is an important indicator of oil aging in gearboxes. This information, combined with available gearbox parameters and specific operating parameters, allows the precise calculation of the oil change time. A physical temperature sensor is not required for this purpose. The pre-processing of the drive data takes place in the integrated PLC of the NORD frequency inverter, which is used for evaluation. The customer has access to the calculated data via all common interfaces.
The drive equipment can be optionally expanded and adapted to the automation task at hand. Customers can choose which tasks (drive monitoring, drive control, process control) they want to accommodate directly in the drive. In smaller production environments, this scalability provides the opportunity to gain experience with this before reorganizing the plant. Three levels of configuration are available. At the first level, the drive unit PLC only performs monitoring of the drive. The drive parameters are processed in advance in the PLC and transmitted to the higher-level control system responsible for drive and process control. At the middle level, the PLC integrates the drive control system and also performs drive-related functions. At the higher configuration level, the controller PLC completely replaces the higher-level control system. In addition to communication with a controller, optional local data management without an Internet connection can use the data.
