Less Unplanned Downtime

Customer Success Story

Thanks to Intelligent Maintenance Strategies

At Norsk Stein‘s Jelsa plant in Norway, the machines‘ drive units in particular are subject to heavy loads. To counteract unplanned downtime, the company previously relied on offline condition monitoring systems. These measurements only partially recognised imminent damage. This was no longer sufficient for the maintenance team. Norsk Stein was therefore looking for a predictive condition monitoring solution. Following a review of several systems, maintenance staff at Jelsa selected the condition monitoring solution OPTIME CM as their preferred solution. In the first step, OPTIME CM was used for several of the drive units. ProLink CMS followed for the bearing monitoring of the cone crushers. In addition, pilots were run with the automatic lubricator CONCEPT1 and the smart lubricator OPTIME C1, filled with Arcanol grease, as well as with two coated bearings.  

Result:

  • In the first year of using OPTIME CM, several several incidents of unplanned downtime were prevented.

  • The OPTIME CM was also implemented in another Norwegian plant.

  • Facts and Figures
  • Challenge
  • Solution
  • What's Special
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Facts and Figures

Challenge

“Despite our offline measurements, a production section came to a standstill that caused serious financial losses. A bearing in a conveyor belt drive had failed. The bearing failed exactly between the monthly measurements. This is precisely why we are looking for an alternative monitoring solution that takes daily measurements – preferably automatically and wireless.“

Norsk Stein‘s maintenance team discussed with Schaeffler possibilities for a predictive maintenance concept.

Solution

Schaeffler’s experts recommended the OPTIME condition monitoring solution. This scalable solution consists of wireless sensors, a gateway and digital services based on proprietary Schaeffler algorithms. Norsk Stein started with 100 sensors. These were installed on critical machines such as motors, pumps, fans or gearboxes. After a short time, this solution alerted the maintenance team to several impending damages. An example of a notification is shown below.
The maintenance team wanted to find out more about the many other warning messages displayed on the dashboard. The Schaeffler experts recommended the ExpertViewer. This is a software-based solution that offers a comprehensive collection of tools for indepth and root cause analyses. It was used, for example, to recognise imminent bearing damage on the conveyor belt drive pulley. An inspection of the bearing revealed considerable corrosion. As a result, rust particles and wear products had become embedded in the raceways. This can lead to pitting in the raceways. In the worst case scenario, the bearing could flake off and fail, resulting in consequential damage. In addition to the push notifications on the smartphone Norsk Stein is using the REST API interface to pull data from OPTIME cloud. They use these data to feed into their maintenance system so that the operators in the control room quickly can see if there are machine status changes on their interface.

What's Special

More than 1600 wireless OPTIME sensors are currently monitoring even less critical units at the Jelsa plant, which is 2,3 x 1 kilometres in size. The condition monitoring solution was also implemented at the Norwegian plant in Tau, starting with 80 sensors. Besides the Norsk Stein maintenance team decided to make some pilots with other Schaeffler solutions. Some pilots are described below.

Pilots

Monitor cone crusher with multi-channel system
The Norsk Stein team decided to monitor the cone crusher bearings with Schaeffler ProLink CMS. These units had jammed in the past when stones exceeding a certain size were fed into the crusher, causing very strong vibrations and eventually leading to bearing damage and problems with the drive motor. The sensors of the multi-channel ProLink CMS system measure the vibrations on the machine and analyse the overall vibration status as well as component-specific vibrations on bearings and gears. All characteristic values and warning states can be transferred to the control centre or the machine control system via OPC UA.

Coated bearings
Based on the findings from the in-depth analysis, Norsk Stein‘s maintenance team decided to equip a machine with two coated bearings.Schaeffler experts recommended in this context to use sealing compound.

Lubrication
For trial purposes, the Schaeffler Concept 1 automatic lubricator and the smart lubricator OPTIME C1 was installed, filled with the recommended Arcanol grease TEMP 110.

Benefit from the Mesh Technology

The condition monitoring solution OPTIME CM is a fully integrated IoT solution which covers the entire functionality from sensor data acquisition by wireless sensors in the field, transferring of the data to the cloud via a gateway, storing, processing and analysing the data in the cloud and providing easy access to the data and analysis results via a mobile application or a webbased dashboards.

OPTIME sensor communications is based on licensed Wirepas Mesh (WM) technology operating on 2,4 GHz ISM frequency band. Wirepas Mesh (WM) is a decentralized wireless communication protocol for IoT devices. With the unique decentralized operation, the device nodes contain all the networking intelligence. The devices themselves make all decisions locally and cooperatively, e.g. about neighbor node selection, TX power, and frequency channel. This enables the most reliable, optimized, scalable and simple to use connectivity for devices.

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