Why Predictive Maintenance is Important in the Steel Industry

Steel plays a vital economic role and impacts the daily life of all. Steel is vital to every major industry, from the manufacturing of a blade, to railways, to air planes; without steel production, it would be difficult for the economy to survive.

The Challenge

The speed of production and demand play important roles in maintaining steel production and supply. Equipment downtime is expensive and productive uptime is valuable. Operators need to maximize asset availability and output while reducing maintenance costs. The risk of unplanned downtime and its spiraling costs must be proactively mitigated. Most importantly, operators need to remain safe and keep the environment safe. In steel and metal operations, time-based maintenance approaches increase the risk to operators as well as increasing costs compared to modern maintenance approaches. Thus, maintenance is an underleveraged opportunity to increase operational efficiency through equipment monitoring solutions. 

Steel Plant Equipment

Coke Oven Batteries, Blast Furnace, Sintering Plants, Steel Melting Points, Mills, Auxiliary Units, and Condition-Based Monitoring in the Steel Industry

The steel industry long ago befriended condition-based monitoring. This method uses the actual operating condition of a mechanical asset to determine its current mechanical state. 

An increased focus on identifying common failure modes in non-standard asset conditions—such as taper bearings and turret bearing applications—allows the steel industry to operate with confidence to deliver the future demand perfectly. 

Time-Based Predictive Analysis in the Steel Industry

Industry 3.0 now works more dependably on non-digital predictive analysis; the actual operating condition of a mechanical asset is to determine its current state of reliability. 

By focusing on the real-time predictive maintenance, it uses time more efficiently during the scheduled disruption. Modern, increased analysis to identify the most common failure modes in non-standard condition monitoring assets—such as taper bearing and turret bearing applications—allows the steel industry to operate with confidence. 

SOLUTION

CIMCON DIGITAL’s compact plug-and-play device has the capacity to measure high-frequency tri-axial mechanical vibrations, temperature, and acoustics. It detects looseness, misalignment, eccentricity, improperly balanced clamping, and unbalanced clamping in machines. It detects issues in real time and uses visual LED indicators.

Benefits of Condition Monitoring in the Steel Industry

• The CIMCON Digital VIBit enables remote access to health and equipment data through the internet from anywhere in the world.
• It addresses concerns about the maintenance of critical equipment such as motors, bearings, and productivity monitoring.
• Provides user-friendly, secure access to the dashboard where data is organized and analyzed in a readable manner.

HOW IT WORKS

CLOUD-BASED HEALTH MANAGEMENT PLATFORM

Our Cloud-based Health Management platform is a powerful tool in reducing maintenance spending and increasing Mean Time Between Repairs (MTBR) by proactively identifying detrimental system conditions prior to catastrophic machine failure by using an Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) model to provide FFT graph analysis, asset health monitoring, real-time data, and historical data.

It provides a dashboard which helps you understand the overall equipment efficiency of assets in the form of waveforms. This further reduces unplanned downtime, increases equipment availability, and significantly reduces inventory costs.