Manufacturing environments are highly dynamic and are subject to different disruptions such as breakdowns, cancelled and rushed orders that affect overall performance of industrial equipment. There is little spare capacity, so unscheduled maintenance and failures must be avoided as they can create a logistical and financial nightmare.
In our latest case study, we show how our client Stork Diary Systems overcomes these challenges with the help of the custom designed transducer, providing huge savings to their customers.
The company is focusing on providing the industry with constantly better, more effective and efficient solutions for processing and filling a wide array of products in attractive consumer packages such as glass or plastic bottles, jars, jugs, pouches and metal (steel or aluminium) cans. In order to prevent unscheduled breakdowns and maintenance, they needed to develop a condition monitoring system for one of their critical production lines, namely bottle filling machines, that could accurately detect faults in real-time and suggest the best course of action for engineers on site.
Datum Electronics Ltd was contracted to design a bespoke torque sensor able to feed data into the system in a simple format. Given that a production line couldn’t be stopped for a long time, the installation process had to be very quick and with minimal intrusion to the working driveline. As the existing limited space was too small to fit a conventional shaft power measurement system and the torque transducer had to be a custom-designed. Moreover, the stator of the Datum torque transducer had to be specifically manufactured so it could be removed without removing the shaft (see the drawing below). In addition, due to the nature of Stork’s business, the sensor had to be environmentally protected from caustic soda and other cleaning agents.
Over the course of the KTP and the Collaborative R&D, a 36-month period, the developed CBPM strategy has successfully predicted and prevented 24 significant breakdowns. This number may not seem like a lot, but taking into account that breakdowns of filling drivelines typically takes 3-5 days to repair, causing a loss of production cost of £350K a day, the system provided savings in excess of £33 million.
You can read the full case study here: Stork: Preventing Breakdowns By Using A Highly Accurate Torque Measurement
If you have custom specifications, give our team a call on 01983 28 28 34 or drop us an email to: web@datum-electronics.co.uk