Wireless Condition Monitoring Reduces Downtime Across the Whole Factory

The most expensive solution is not always the best — especially for a large-scale industrial operation such as a consumer packaged goods assembly line.

These lines depend on equipment like enormous motors running at high capacity with as little downtime as possible. The problem arises when cost limits an expensive high-fidelity condition monitoring solution so that it is only applied to 10% of the factory’s fleet of machines.

With manufacturing operations and factories running around the clock all over the world, there is an essential need for lower-cost condition monitoring for that remaining 90%, lest any of them go down. That could mean bringing production to a halt, costing precious time and money.

That’s where wireless condition monitoring comes into play.

What Is Wireless Condition Monitoring?

Condition monitoring is generally known as a process by which sensors, which used to be ubiquitously hard-wired, are attached to mission-critical industrial equipment such as motors and pumps to measure vibration, temperature and other statuses in an effort to provide fault detection either after it occurs or, ideally, before it occurs.

These high-fidelity sensors are a costly and limiting solution, necessitating a new and innovative approach to this challenge that manufacturers and large-scale industrial enterprises face.

Wireless condition monitoring is the answer to that challenge.

For a fraction of the cost of a legacy hard-wired system, that remaining 90% of equipment across the factory can be addressed by utilizing existing WiFi networks as an IoT platform.  For example, an Aruba Networks installation can be utilized, giving the entire operation a potentially huge advantage over their competitors when it comes to reducing downtime and a lot more.

And now, thanks to low-cost wireless sensors such as HID’s BEEKs™ CM v2 BLE beacon that can detect 3-axis vibrations and temperature variations, condition monitoring can be extended wirelessly to the rest of the facility’s fleet of equipment. Furthermore, an entire operation’s factory floor can be blanketed with a real-time, bi-directional data network enabled by HID’s BluFi™ gateways, allowing third-party, cloud-based applications to parse and leverage sensor data as enterprise decision-makers see fit.

This is where wireless condition monitoring is robust, scalable and cost-effective.

You can't fix what you cannot measure, and you cannot measure what you cannot see. —Brad Williams, Sales Director, Industrial – IoT Services, HID Global

Proactive Fault Detection

The previously mentioned fault detection is arguably the biggest benefit that wireless condition monitoring brings.

For example, when a wireless condition monitoring solution is implemented on motors, pumps and compressors, which are critical to keep machines moving parts and products down a conveyor system, the whole remote wireless system detects vibrations, looking at the potential failure of this equipment. This type of fault detection is based on vibration and temperature anomalies that the sensors pick up.

And that precipitates a maintenance approach referred to as condition-based maintenance. Through wireless condition monitoring sensor-driven systems, a critical piece of an equipment’s maintenance cycle can now be based on a known or predicted health state of the asset. This not only offers the highest ROI for reducing downtime, but it also provides insights into the equipment that the other maintenance cycle options, such as “Run-to-Failure” or “Scheduled Maintenance,” are incapable of providing. Wireless condition monitoring systems supply stakeholders and decision-makers with the best possible data and tools to help reduce downtime, optimize their operations and decrease costs.

HID’s 2021 white paper on the subject highlights the innovation of wireless condition monitoring for fault detection and more.

As a leader in boosting efficiency, enhancing productivity and connecting things, HID Global answered the challenge to the growing need for a real-time monitoring solution that provides increased visibility into equipment performance using multiple data points to monitor and react quickly to critical events.

At the end of the day, a proper wireless, IoT-enabled condition monitoring installation empowers an industrial enterprise to:

• Improve inspections and maintenance practices
• Improve operations decisions
• And, most importantly, save money!

For a deeper dive into the power of HID’s Condition Monitoring IoT solutions for industrial and manufacturing operations, check out our latest webinar, Efficient and Scalable IoT Condition Monitoring Solutions.

Nick Iandolo is an experienced Senior Marketing Strategist specializing in Content Marketing and Corporate Communications Writing, primarily for market-disrupting technology organizations. He has a knack for taking highly technical materials from subject matter experts and translating them into actionable marketing collateral for both digital and print. His most recent roles were senior content creator positions for Exponent and PTC, where his work has been featured in publications such as Morning Consult, NewDesign Magazine UK, SmartCard Identity News, and Construction Outlook. In his personal life, he is a creative writer penning digital tech trends blogs and science fiction stories, and he is also an enthusiast Spartan Race athlete. Nick lives just outside of Boston Mass with his wife, daughter, and Golden Retriever.