Process automation giant Honeywell has teamed up with SKF Group, a provider of condition monitoring technology, to deliver a turnkey system for monitoring rotating equipment over Honeywell's OneWireless industrial mesh network.
The product, called OneWireless Equipment Health Monitoring (EHM), transmits vibration and operating parameter information from pumps, compressors, and motors in the plant to asset management and distributed control systems to help personnel schedule maintenance and track inventory.
OneWireless, which Honeywell rolled out in June, is designed as a plant-wide network that can support multiple industrial protocols and applications. It also supports a variety of radios and transmitters used in different applications. Devices with wireless sensors can send small amounts of data back onto the mesh network for location applications, for example. But monitoring conditions such as acceleration, velocity, temperature, and bearing data requires radios that can accommodate higher-bandwidth transmissions, sent less frequently. OneWireless EHM answers that need by packaging hardware and software in a system that is easily deployed, the company said.
"EHM targets the type of equipment that isn't monitored online today," said Jeff Becker, Honeywell Process Solutions' global wireless business director, in an interview with Managing Automation. "It's a lot of the lower-tier assets, monitored by a guy with a clipboard who may make the rounds once a month." Until now, there has not been a way to actively measure these devices on a real-time basis, he said.
As a result, manufacturers that take equipment offline for preventive maintenance often find that the equipment is fine and didn't have to be taken offline at all. Alternatively, maintenance personnel conducting manual inspections might miss a problem with a pump, for example, which could cause unwarranted downtime. According to Becker, the biggest cause of production downtime in a plant stems from rotating equipment failure.
"If they had an inexpensive way to capture data and trend it over time to predict when it will fail, they could proactively replace equipment [before] there are problems," Becker said.
Honeywell beta tested the OneWireless EHM technology on an offshore oil freighter, where the technology is monitoring about 30 devices, Becker said. It integrates easily into a pre-installed OneWireless network — taking less than four hours to set up, according to the company.
A OneWireless EHM starter kit, priced at roughly $25,000, includes four eight-channel devices (covering 32 process points), one wireless multi-node, cables, safety vibration sensors, and data management software. The EHM software can deduce probable bearing defects, misalignment, and pump cavitations. The software translates that data into alarms that can be sent to a Honeywell DCS or asset management application.
"Companies can save roughly 50% of annual maintenance costs by using this type of monitoring," Becker said.