Factories can save up to 90% in valve monitoring costs with wireless IoT sensors

from Factories can save up to 90% in valve monitoring costs with wireless IoT sensors
by Anasia D'mello
https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Factories and plants in industries – such as chemical processing, pulp and paper, water and waste-water treatment, have seen the benefits of remote valve monitoring. Traditional retrofitted monitoring solutions, however, are costly and slow to deploy for factories with thousands of manual valves of different types.

There is a more cost-effective alternative – factories have evidenced a 90% reduction in retrofitting investment, by using industry-grade wireless sensors and Industrial IoT technologies.

In this article, global Industrial IoT specialist, Pertti Kujala, the director of Smart Factory business of Haltian, talks about retrofit valve monitoring, and explains how factories can save substantial costs.

What’s remote valve monitoring?

Factories and plants in the chemical process industries, pulp and paper, water and waste-water treatment, and other sectors are, first and foremost – known by the massive networks of process pipelines, controlled by thousands of hand-operated valves. Until recently, the systems have been operating successfully and effectively for many years with different types of hand valves.

The remote monitoring of these manual valves is becoming even more critical in process industries as the Industry 4.0 transformation sweeps through the factories worldwide. To maintain future competitiveness – industrial enterprises need to increase production efficiency, optimise processing operations, prevent unnecessary outages, and improve safety.

With the integration of SCADA with field instruments, and also smartphones, tablets, and other mobile solutions, industrial automation and process control is growing rapidly for the greater good.

Benefits for factories and plants

Remote valve monitoring is made up of several components: and it detects the valve position with a retrofit sensor device, mounted on the hand-operated valve. Position sensors are divided into angular position sensors and linear position sensors. The sensor device then reports the position data in a digital format to the factory’s central control system.

With an ideal remote monitoring solution, positions of all valves in a factory can be monitored on the central control system in the factory in real-time – from thousands of different points, along the process pipelines. Remote monitoring of process control valves can provide multiple benefits to factories in countless different ways:

Bring massive cost savings
Enable faster process recovery after maintenance breaks
Increase safety at the plant
Reduce the occurrence of errors and quality deviations
Provide valuable analytics, and help to prevent unplanned downtime.

The benefits from remote valve monitoring amid the ongoing Industry 4.0 transformation have propelled the remote monitoring and control market onto a steady growth trajectory with a CAGR of 4.5%. It is expected to reach $27 billion (€24.5 billion) by 2023 globally.

Challenges of traditional retrofitting solutions

Many factories and plants hesitate to invest in remote valve monitoring expansions, despite rapid market growth and the significant economic benefits,. Retrofitting a monitoring system on thousands of different types of valves – some of which can be very old, often manufactured by different vendors – is costly and time-consuming.

Pertti Kujala has compiled a rundown of the main challenges in retrofitting remote monitoring on existing valves.

The current valve position sensors in the market often fit only one type of valve, and different valve manufacturers have their own specific position [...]

The post Factories can save up to 90% in valve monitoring costs with wireless IoT sensors appeared first on IoT Now - How to run an IoT enabled business.