Hidden treasure

Abstract

As processes become ever more complicated and margins thinner, minimizing downtime by ensuring that industrial machinery operates correctly is as important as ever. Proper condition monitoring of critical equipment can act as an early warning system against impending problems. However, condition monitoring is not used everywhere, often because of the expense of installing proper sensors and cabling, especially if the monitoring system needs to retrofitted to existing equipment. Another reason is that the task of selecting and interpreting the large quantities of data available in the most effective way seems daunting as well as costly. ABB has devised a way to easily access and process important data without the burden of additional equipment, costs and downtime. By extracting and processing data from existing devices traditionally used in process industries, such as drives, customers can prevent otherwise unforeseen problems from occurring and hence maximize the availability of their machines.