Process Automation & Condition Monitoring

Process Automation: 

The accelerating advancement of modern technologies in the design and manufacturing process of the industry has dramatically increased the need for automation in business processes and operations. This progressive inclusion of process automation in the system has led to the relief of people or operators from the simple, rudimentary, and monotonous tasks with the help of digitizing operational and process checks by using modern tools and control systems.

Process Automation is an act of simplifying intricate processes by majorly reducing human input and streamlining the routine and centralized tasks in order to enhance uniformity and strengthen process transparency. It improves process performance and product quality, reduces errors, increases equipment availability, and optimizes operational and maintenance costs.

Process automation comprises three levels of functions, i.e.

• Continuous feedback control system
• Automatic Supervision
• Management

With the drastic inclusion of sensors, actuators, HMI, and the effective implementation of the feedback control system, it has become easy to continuously observe, collect, and control the Plant’s equipment based on the measured variables according to their normal and abnormal behavior – this act of supervision is also known as condition monitoring of the equipment, wherein advance mathematical processes and computational intelligence are used as for fault detection and its diagnosis – essential to detect premature failures and their onsets.

Condition Monitoring:

An act of supervision that uses sensors, vibrations, infrared testing, oil analysis, and other non-destructive techniques to identify the health condition of the installed equipment and determine the suitable maintenance program accordingly so that machine runs throughout its designated life without experiencing any significant failures. This action is called condition monitoring – which is also a fundamental tool of condition-based maintenance (CBM).

Condition monitoring is not a mere machine monitoring technique, nor it’s restricted to the maintenance scheduling program, it covers more than that – a broader aspect of management technique though not the whole of maintenance management but it’s considered a critical function of the maintenance management tool – a program that takes the advantage of monitoring, evaluates all essential parameters regularly and gives out information in the form of noise, vibration, temperature, etc. while taking notes of any anomalies condition monitoring software sends an alert whenever a change is detected in machine health.

One cannot reap the benefits from the outstanding program until the data obtained from condition monitoring techniques are thoroughly analyzed and then suitable action is taken to resolve the incipient abnormalities – the whole crux of the technique. Condition monitoring uses different techniques such as vibration analysis, oil analysis, thermography, ultrasound, and other non-destructive testing tools to achieve optimum and consistent plant reliability while enabling the organization to increase production capacity and optimize operation and maintenance costs.

With the enormous development and implementation of the feedback control system, great progress has also been observed in the field of condition monitoring where in past the automatic supervision was mostly based on limit checking of important parameters and raising alarms if the values are exceeded from the threshold which then asks operators to act upon or isolate the faulty parts automatically through the protection system but now with the evolution, equipment health status can be checked at any point in time – fault detection and prognosis is possible with the help of advance computational intelligence and mathematical models – by extrapolating historical trends it is now possible to calculate the time the fault will take to turn into functional failure. 

This predictive feature of the condition monitoring provides factual data of the machine health that assists the manager a great deal in deciding when to schedule the maintenance activities – this type of maintenance is also called Predictive Maintenance.

Role of Condition Monitoring in Condition Based Maintenance & Predictive Maintenance:

Condition Based Maintenance and Predictive Maintenance are essentially the same having Condition Monitoring in common – a basic tool used by both maintenance programs to detect incipient failures in the machine. If CM acts on the condition of machine health, then the PdM chooses to use the equipment’s historical condition to establish predictions and plans accordingly – and condition monitoring is a perfect component to develop equipment health history over time.

Benefits of Condition Monitoring:

• The effective implementation of the condition monitoring ensures the equipment availability and increases the overall reliability of the plant.
• Condition monitoring is a vital step to improve safety at the plant as it reduces the chances of equipment breakdown which depending on the nature of the asset could be quite serious.
• Supervision of equipment and process is easy with condition monitoring.
• Condition monitoring increases the production capacity of the plant and improves the product quality.
•  It decreases maintenance costs and reduces equipment downtime.
• Continuous monitoring of the equipment's health status allows for the detection of faults and diagnosis of its origin.
• Condition monitoring increases the life span of the equipment.
• With the evolution of modern technologies, online condition monitoring is also possible – round-the-clock parameters are measured and the accessibility of real-time data enables you to determine the root cause of the issue easily and quickly.
• Condition monitoring is a big component that helps organizations to shift their maintenance actions from corrective to preventive or predictive programs.
• The effective implementation of condition monitoring at the plant assists and elevates the process of asset management.
• By using condition monitoring the return on investment (ROI) of the asset can be maximized.
• Maintenance engineers can work more efficiently as the effective implementation of condition monitoring helps the engineer to focus on the right fault rather than wasting their time on locating the fault.