INTRODUCTION
ifm – Leaders in automation technology
ifm develops, produces, and sells sensors, controllers, software and systems for industrial automation and digitalization worldwide. The family-run ifm group of companies has subsidiaries, development, and production sites in more than 70 countries. ifm is one of the market leaders in automation technology with high product quality and accurate technical data.
THE CHALLENGE
Condition monitoring – A new way of doing things
If an organization has been operating with breakdown maintenance or regular planned maintenance, a change over to condition monitoring can provide major improvements in plant availability and reduced costs.
Machine vibration and surface temperature are typical examples of condition data that can be collected from rotating equipment, including AC induction motors, pumps, compressors, conveyors, blowers, fans, and more. Changes in temperature or vibration patterns can be indicative of arising faults, or a need for maintenance.
Wireless sensors- The key to scalability
Only critical equipment is usually monitored with wired sensors. The high cost of installation and maintenance presents the biggest scalability challenges. That’s why the rest of the plant equipment, whether it’s motors, pumps, fans, or gears may not be monitored at all.
This gives rise to the need for wireless sensors for condition monitoring. Wireless battery-operated sensor is easy and much more cost-efficient to deploy than the wired one. Their cost can be up to 4x less expensive per measurement point and even 15x faster to deploy than a wired sensor.
THE SOLUTION
Mature ready-to-go products
The sensor devices and gateway operate in an intelligent wireless mesh-network enabling massive scale. Single network can consist of hundreds of sensors and multiple gateways. All sensor devices measure data as well as route data from other sensors. Without any centralized network management, the devices connect automatically to each other and choose the most efficient route for the data to the gateway. From gateway the data is sent to ifm condition monitoring software over a wireless or wired connection. Wireless data transfers are secure and resilient to interference in industrial environments.
