This case study highlights how FAR, as a company, makes use of information technology to monitor it's costs and improve it's processes. This allows the company to reduce production costs in order to become a more competitive company in both the national and international markets.
During the summer of 2013, FAR decided to install energy monitoring and management system that consisted of several Electrex instruments that collects general plant consumption data. This entire system could be easily managed and monitored via smartphones, PDAs and tablets.
To give some basic background on the company, FAR has been operation for more than 20 years now. Their activities are carried out in 2 main productions sites of over 15,000 square meters. They house 85 employees and they make use of 10 fully automated production units that are completely integrated into the company's IT system. Some of the company's main objectives is the development of human resources, improving their working environment, optomisation of resources and the reduction of energy consumption.
THE APPLICATION:
By making use of a IT infrastructure, alongside mobile and desktop smart devices for monitoring the company's costs and production processes, allows them to lower their production costs as mentioned above. With this goal set in mind, FAR decided to install the Electrex energy monitoring and management system. This system consists of several instruments that together collect data pertaining to general energy consumption due to the production plant, consumption from their two main transformers as well as the consumption of gas (This is done by using two X3M H energy analysers alongside one Yocto I/O module connected to a Yocto NET gateway device). They are also able to monitor the energy consumption from theoir thermoregulator, their shearing machines, a robot, a furnace, a press machine, a tape machine as well as the gas used by the furnace (This is done by using six Atto energy analysers and one Yocto I/O connected to a Yocto NET gateway device).
The following software add-ons were included to ensure that the system could be easily monitored and managed via smartphones, PDAs and tablets:
- Web Log 8
- Mail Alarm
- Calendar
- Charts
These together, make it possible to manage the various feature of the system through web pages as well as the displaying of historical and instantaneous data collected by all the Electrex instruments.
For this system, custom webpages were developed and loaded onto the Yocto NET gateway device (On it's internal web server). The following image will show an example of the custom web page where the general energy counter (In kWh), general instantaneous power (In kW), the instantaneous power of the two transformers as well as the total gas consumption (In meters cubed) is displayed:
By selecting the "Charts" button in the page displayed above, another page is loaded showing charts/graphs of the energy consumption:
The following picture shows the custom web page showing the progressive partial counters of the different loads such as the thermoregulator, the shearing machine, the robot, the furnace, the press machine, the tape machine as well as the gas consumed by the furnace:
By means of a single button on the page displayed above, the operator can reset the counters, making it possible to obtain the total energy and gas consumed at the end of each work cycle.
The webpage also indicates any alarms pertaining to grid or furnace functioning failures.
Inside the production plant, the Energy Brain software is installed. This software is used for core management and analysis of the consumption/production of electrical energy (As well as gas, water, steam etc.) or environmental and state/process parameters such as luminosity, temperature, humidity, calories, pressure etc. By means of this software, the company's energy manager, or other stakeholders, can manage the historical data (via numerical or graphical reports), obtain real time online measurements, monitor power quality, calendars, measurement campaigns, event logging, alarms, cost centers as well as exporting of all this data.
THE BENEFITS:
- Ability to organise data per each autonomous production unit and process which allows for better management of production activity and calculations for cost centers.
- Allows for immediate detection of abnormal/negative trends of energy consumption, thus allowing one to act promptly.
- Historic trending of past energy consumptions allows for early detection of any deviation.
- Easily identify energy inefficiencies, waste and/or evaluation and identification of technical interventions for reduction in energy consumption.
- Evaluation of energy saving projects.
THE NEXT STEP:
Because FAR implemented a full monitoring system, they were able to perform a series of evaluations that focused on optomising resources which led to reduction in energy consumption. As an example, the system allowed the maintenance team at FAR to detect inefficiency of one of the motors used by one of their automation machines. This led to replacing the motor with new brushless motors as well as optomisation requests to the manufacturer of that very machine. After making these changes, they monitoring system detected positive results.
FAR plans on extending the monitoring system to all their automated production units by including the measurement of compressed air and fume aspirators.
THE ELECTREX MONITORING SYSTEMS:
As mentioned, the energy monitoring and management system implemented by FAR is based on the Electrex set of instruments and software packages. These systems are ised in energy efficiency and energy automation applications for industrial, tertiary, residential as well as renewable sectors.
The Electrex products make it possible to manage and monitor all energy sources (Electrical energy, gas, water etc.), environmental parameters related to consumption/production (Temperature, luminosity, humidity etc.) as well as process parameters (Compressed air, level, states etc.) in one complete system. Allowing you to achieve the goal for saving energy costs.
All Electrex systems are modular and can be expanded when necessary. The product range consists of:
- Measurement instruments used for energy, environmental and process parameters.
- Instruments for energy consumption, production management and energy automation.
- Remote monitoring.
- Data display on various platforms.
- Web servers, gateways, converters and interfaces (Ethernet, Wifi, Serial, ModBus, GSM etc.).
- Software dedicated to retrieving and managing energy data.
Please contact us here at Futre, to find out more about these great products and what they can do for you and your company.