In this RS Ask the Expert Q&A, John Tuley from TE Connectivity explains what condition monitoring is and why it’s vital to Industry 4.0. He also addresses the evolution of industrial condition monitoring technologies, where they’re headed and some of the TE Connectivity products ideal for deploying and improving condition monitoring solutions.
In this RS Ask the Expert Q&A, TE Connectivity’s John Tuley, who is responsible for global industrial and IoT business development for TE Sensors, talks about the evolution and the future of industrial condition monitoring, its inherent value and the vital role it plays in the continued evolution of Industry 4.0 and predictive and prescriptive maintenance strategies. He also addresses enabling technologies, shares some advice for implementation and introduces the unique value of TE Connectivity’s industrial condition monitoring solutions.
Hi John. Thank you for joining us for another edition of RS’s Ask the Expert series. Could you explain what condition monitoring is and why it’s important to monitor industrial equipment?
Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here and excited to talk about the value, evolution and future of industrial condition monitoring. Condition monitoring has been around for a long time. Since the advent of machines, someone had to repair them, maintain them and keep them running. When I started in manufacturing a long time ago, you would have these people who could listen to a machine, hear what’s going on and know what’s wrong, or at least where to start looking for what’s wrong. But although that still qualified as condition monitoring, those assessments weren’t based on data.
Modern industrial condition monitoring began where people started putting sensors on machines to better understand what’s happening to the machine in order to improve uptime, prevent machines from shutting down unexpectedly and definitively know where to look for problems when failures occur — all of which prevents or mitigates costly downtime and improves production efficiencies and equipment lifetimes. But it’s still evolving today. The first modern industrial condition monitoring solutions relied on programable logic controllers (PLCs), which were widely relegated to high-dollar assets. Today’s smaller and more economical Industrial Internet of Things or IIoT-enabled condition monitoring sensors can be installed on as many assets as facility managers wish to keep tabs on. And this exponential expansion of industrial condition monitoring solutions and the data that they gather is essential to the continued evolution of Industry 4.0, which is revolutionizing the manufacturing and distribution industries by interconnecting more equipment and enabling the timely and economical collection and analysis of more data that can be used to optimize production processes, improve efficiencies, better maintain equipment and increase profitability.
What is the inherent value of industrial condition monitoring?
That’s a great question because everyone is trying to figure that out right now, and what they’re finding is that it’s a combination of cost savings, real-time data collection and reduced maintenance requirements. COVID expedited the need for real-time, remote data collection. Suddenly, you didn’t have as many people in your facilities, so you didn’t know what was happening with your assets because you didn’t have technicians walking around to monitor machines. Given those circumstances, facility managers really needed that real-time, remote data coming in. IIoT-enabled condition monitoring solutions successfully bridged that gap and we’re still seeing an accelerated rate of adoption due to the skilled labor shortages that we’ve been experiencing, at least here in the U.S.
Industrial condition monitoring can also have a positive environmental impact because it enables companies to run more efficiently, which can contribute to achieving their environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals. For example, since real-time, remote condition monitoring enables predictive rather than preventative or corrective maintenance, it allows operators to stop machinery and change the oil or replace parts only when they need to be changed instead of on a prescriptive schedule (like once a month or week) or after something goes wrong, which reduces waste, downtime and operating expenses and improves asset uptimes, lifetimes and efficiencies.
One of the biggest reasons that more and more companies are deploying industrial condition monitoring solutions is to achieve the increased productivity and cost savings and reduced operating expenses that studies have consistently shown they provide. Depending on the product selection, installation and how successfully a company deployed their solution, cost savings achieved with condition monitoring solutions can range from 10% all the way up to 40%.
You mentioned that industrial condition monitoring supports predictive maintenance. Can you tell us a little more about that?
Predictive maintenance strategies are pretty commonplace today and growing more popular than preventative maintenance since they significantly reduce equipment downtimes and operating costs, and they are directly enabled by condition monitoring solutions. The massive amounts of data that industrial condition monitoring sensors collect can be used to accurately predict when something will go wrong with the machine, which allows operators to schedule the equipment downtime necessary for maintenance and repairs when it will be least impactful to production and profitability.
In addition, the predictive maintenance strategies enabled by industrial condition monitoring solutions are evolving right alongside them. So, in the next four or five years, we’ll start to see prescriptive maintenance strategies go into effect. Prescriptive maintenance uses artificial intelligence (AI) to identify when a machine will need to be repaired and what is going to fail and will automatically order the necessary parts and schedule the maintenance team to fix it. As such, it will further optimize and reduce the amount of manual intervention currently required to execute essential maintenance procedures.
And although the realization of prescriptive maintenance is still several years out, we’re already seeing the roots of it, including the proliferation of compact, economical sensors that facilities can afford to put in more locations to generate more comprehensive data.
What role does wireless technology play in industrial condition monitoring?
Wireless technology is a key enabler of condition monitoring technology. Running wires requires both part costs and labor costs. So, having to wire sensors to the hundreds of different machines, pumps, motors, conveyor systems and other devices commonly deployed in manufacturing facilities would be prohibitively expensive, which is why earlier condition monitoring solutions, like PLCs, were relegated to high-dollar assets. Wired solutions also create trip hazards and often require cable protection solutions in industrial environments, which adds additional costs. And they can introduce electrical hazards as well. For instance, I once had a customer tell me that they initially deployed a wired sensor solution on some big pumps, but the first time the maintenance team went out to service the machine they accidentally cut the wires.
The prevalence of low-power large and wide area networks (LAN and WAN) in industrial facilities combined with the rapid proliferation of compact, low-power-consumption digital versus analog sensors compatible with low-power communication protocols like Zigbee, Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT), LoRaWAN and Bluetooth has created a convergence that allows facility managers to economically deploy extensive sensor networks that deliver impressive ROI.
What advice do you have for someone interested in implementing industrial condition monitoring solutions? Where should they start to see impactful improvements?
Before implementing condition monitoring solutions, you must understand what you’re trying to accomplish and identify your problem points. Where you need to start from an asset standpoint will depend on the individual facility. The assets we most commonly see condition monitoring solutions deployed on include pumping systems, anything that rotates, anything with a motor that has bearings that can fail and cause a factory shutdown, any type of conveyor system and any application that requires temperature monitoring. The most common industrial condition monitoring sensors include vibration, temperature and pressure sensors. Vibration sensors are extremely common in pumping systems and motor applications and temperature sensors are often used in conjunction with the others.
For example, in data centers you have to control the temperature and humidity to optimize the efficacy of your air conditioning and cooling technologies and ensure that everything runs as efficiently as possible, so you’d deploy temperature and humidity sensors.
What types of industrial condition monitoring solutions does TE Connectivity offer and do they deliver any unique value?
TE provides both kinds of traditional condition monitoring sensors. We still offer wired sensor solutions that remain popular in certain market segments, but the future is in the wireless realm and enabling customers to deploy sensors optimized for industrial environments quickly, easily and economically. To this end, we develop some really innovative sensors. For example, we identified a trend: that facilities equipped with increasingly dense sensor networks generating vast amounts of data need edge devices to process and analyze as much of that data as possible since sending massive amounts of data to the cloud is getting too expensive and too time-consuming for a lot of companies. And, in response to that trend, we developed new AI-enabled sensors equipped with machine learning technologies.
These new sensors will help customers do more edge processing at the gateway because the tiny machine learning movement will really drive those machine learning algorithms down into the sensor. We call it analytics at the point of sensing.
The closer you get to where that sensing data is happening, the more efficient you are and the better data you have without having to do any transcriptions or filtering or compression to know what’s going on. So, we see the trend towards doing as much edge analytics as possible accelerating very rapidly. And since we provide sensors and other hardware, we’ve partnered with industry-leading providers of gateway and cloud solutions to further ease the integration of condition monitoring solutions into Industry 4.0 environments and help customers capitalize on the vast amounts of actionable data they provide.
We also develop sensors optimized for use in harsh environments like industrial facilities. In fact, 80% of our sensor sales are used in harsh environments. Other unique benefits include our ability to scale with customers, our extensive product portfolio and a vast network of local technical sales teams that collaborate with our customers to ensure that we satisfy their unique application requirements.
Are there any industrial condition monitoring solutions that you’d specifically like to highlight?
We offer several wired and wireless sensor solutions optimized for industrial condition monitoring. For example, our 8911 Series wireless accelerometer sensors are designed for vibration monitoring in applications including remote condition monitoring and predictive maintenance. They combine a sensor, data collector, digital signal processor and radio into a compact device that measures both vibration and temperature data and ruggedly withstands harsh industrial environments. They also exhibit wide bandwidth performance up to 10 kHz, communicate using the LoRaWAN protocol and provide spectrum data, which is a really cool feature. A lot of competing solutions provide velocity, displacement and root mean square acceleration (gRMS), but we give customers the ability to get spectrum data out in the frequency domain because we run fast Fourier transform (FFTs) algorithms on it and do some peak detection as well.
Our M5600 Series high-accuracy, Bluetooth-enabled pressure sensors are also unique. The series supports measurements spanning 50 PSI to 10,000 PSI depending on the configuration and is easy to connect to a gateway, or even your smartphone.
We also have an extensive portfolio of wired sensors, including M3200 pressure sensors with digital or analog output and a whole range of wired temperature sensors as well.
And these are just a few examples. We offer many unique sensor solutions ideal for industrial condition monitoring applications.
Additional Information
TE Connectivity is a leading global engineering partner for today’s innovation leaders and technology entrepreneurs and is dedicated to helping solve tomorrow’s toughest challenges with its extensive and ever-expanding portfolio of advanced connectivity and sensor solutions engineered to deliver durable, high-reliability performance in even the harshest environments. For more information, visit TE Connectivity at alliedelec.com.
For assistance identifying and deploying condition monitoring solutions including temperature sensors, pressure sensors, vibration sensors, accelerometers and PLCs, please contact your local RS representative at 1.866.433.5722 or reach out to the technical support team.
For additional information, please visit the following links:
- TE Connectivity Sensors at alliedelec.com
- New TE Connectivity Products at alliedelec.com
- Industrial Condition Monitoring: Sensors for Predictive Maintenance in Harsh Environments
- Sensors for Industrial Condition Monitoring
- Predictive Maintenance With Vibration Sensors
- Wireless Sensing With Vibration Transmitters
