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Advantech and Actility announce the launch of a integrated AI-based solution, supporting the machine operation team in realising machine prognostics and health management. It allows to monitor multi machines’ status in one stop thanks to the real-time and next seven days’ machine healthy index, including ISO 10816 and degradation level.

The new solution is based on the Advantech WISE-2410 vibration sensor, the high-performance WISE-6610 LoRaWAN gateway, Actility’s ThingPark Enterprise IoT network management platform and the advanced Advantech’ iMachine/PHM application, and is now available under trial kit form on Actility’s IoT marketplace: ThingPark Market.

The challenges of performing machines health checks

Maintenance companies have been experiencing increased difficulties in fulfilling their role in recent years. Due to the pandemic, they have been no longer able to travel to customer facilities to perform asset health analysis, and service providers are unable to realise their services and offers. May are still battling is an exponential slowdown due to the global lockdown.

Many manufacturers who rely on these services to maintain the health of process critical assets are helpless and thus face a high of costly downtime during these unprecedented times.

Implementing efficient maintenance processes is crucial to operators of industrial facilities, but it’s not an easy task. One of their greatest wishes is to avoid lengthy processes of data connection, pre-processing, model development and inference engine development.  

In traditional method, still used by most factory operators, the on-site inspection is done manually, regularly but without stable inspection quality, and only passively reacting and informing the maintenance crew when the problem occurs.

Proactively keeping facilities at productive status thanks to IoT

Actility & Advantech found a perfect partnership to join their forces and offer a solution to solve those issues.

Thanks to a great combination of hardware and software expertise, we designed a winning solution to keep our engines healthy and monitor them to prevent any possible mishap: the Predictive Maintenance solution for Rotating Machinery solution. By installing LoRaWAN-connected vibration sensors and easy implementation of the infrastructure, allows you to analyse data from sensors measuring vibrations frequencies of machines and equipment in order to detect anomalous behavior, therefore enabling industrial end customers to decrease machines shutdowns and work accidents while increasing performance and safety.

Users get a very precise machine status prediction, and prediction model retraining that refines the model while repositioning the sensor or refining the model performance.

Moreover, the most important feature designed ad hoc for the new solution is that it now acts proactively based on the future state of the machine, instead of carrying out routine inspections, preventing machine faults in advance. With the finetuned pre-trained model, users can expect to gain the inference result within two weeks of sensor installation.

Using this solution means joining the Industrial Revolution 4.0, and therefore ensuring longer lifespan of equipment, lower spare parts inventory, and having more cost-effective than run-to-failure or planned maintenance.

Applying the solution in an infinite number of use cases

Thanks to Predictive Maintenance solution it was possible to overview all types of machines in one-stop, in real-time getting also the machine’s historical and future status. It can be used on petrochemical plants, PCB plants, semiconductor manufacturing plants, and so much more.

One of the most use cases is the rotating manufacturing machinery management in steel plants. In this specific industry, the failure of the manufacturing machine will seriously affect the product line, that is the reason why it is extremely important to prevent unexpected breakdown.

How Advantech – Predictive Maintenance solution works?

• Pretrained model implementation – The model is trained on a large benchmark dataset to solve a problem like the one that the customer wants to solve, so thanks to that, our solution, can automatically analyse the data preprocessing, feature value selection, and deep learning model processes.
  
• Degrading level – The degrading level indicates the machine’s rotating signal status compared to a healthy device. To establish an efficient maintenance strategy, the operators could set the index threshold based on the experts’ experience.
  
• ISO 10816 – gives general guidelines for the evaluation of machine vibration by measurements on non-rotating parts. This part of ISO 10816, however, establishes special procedures and guidelines for the measurement and classification of mechanical vibration of reciprocating compressors. Using multi-indexes, you can monitor your machine and keep an eye on your production line.

The pre-packed solution Trial Kit

What you will find in the kit:

Advantech: WISE-2410

The WISE-2410 device follows ISO 10816, which provides guidelines for the evaluation of machine vibration by measurements on non-rotating parts. WISE-2410 balances the wireless bandwidth between it and the gateway, so it also mitigates the data transmission fail rates between edge devices and gateways.

• Interoperability – Pre-integrated with Actility Application dashboard for simple decoding and encoding services.
• Multimarket senor type of device provides a robust and resilient solution to support different environments.

Advantech: WISE-6610

The WISE-6610 is a high-performance LoRaWAN gateway that offers reliable connectivity for industrial environments. It supports the LoRaWAN protocol for building LoRaWAN private and public networks, as well as various protocols including MQTT. The hardware and software flexibility of the WISE-6610 provides rich features for edge intelligence systems, and its support for VPN tunneling with various protocols ensures safe communications.

ThingPark Enterprise – Low-power wide-area networks for the Internet of Things provider

ThingPark Enterprise is the LoRaWAN private networking solution that streamlines the digitalisation of your business processes by connecting your most valuable assets with efficiency. Deploying ThingPark Enterprise, you will benefit from a dependable, secure, and scalable private LoRaWAN connectivity infrastructure to enable a wide variety of IoT use cases. ThingPark Enterprise streamlines IoT network operations, providing enterprises with a proficient UX to easily build a multi-gateway LoRaWAN network and feed data to IoT applications. ThingPark Enterprise dashboards provide key operational insights & alarm management. Your LPWAN gateways and devices are managed by a fully geo-redundant platform with 24/7 supervision.

Advantech – iMachine/PHM

iMachine/PHM is your best smart machine management booster.

We assist the maintenance crew in handling historical, real-time, and future machine data. With the predictive maintenance solution, you can smartly arrange the human power and resources, realising smart machine management.

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