August 2018Maintenance, Test & Measurement, Calibration
Managing the condition of remote assets is no longer a major undertaking. Equipment like pumps and motors require ongoing maintenance and valuable up-time is compromised by missed preventive maintenance interventions. Predicting when intervention is necessary is essential to enterprise performance at all levels, but, with pressure on staffing head count, the emphasis falls to effective usage of assets, be they people, machinery or finances.
Condition monitoring looks at logging typical plant status and manages things chronologically. Typical field condition parameters include pump control status, run/trip, run hours, bearing temperature, sump, suction pressure, dam levels, power consumption, flow rate and vibration.
Remote monitoring requires infrastructure to gather the information: networking, telemetry, data acquisition and scada. The more distributed the assets are, the more expensive this infrastructure gets.
Omniflex provides local condition monitoring using touch screen HMI for visual representation of the status of the asset. The HMI can also interface to almost any PLC and is connected to an Omniflex data access point (DAP), which uses GSM communications to gather the data from any outstation. Using the GSM infrastructure means low in-house cost and a reliable data acquisition service.
The Omniflex DAP is a versatile RTU. This full functionality IEC61131 PLC enables both control and wireless communications to exist in a single package with flexible I/O and sub net communication interfaces for VSDs and other serial devices including power meters. The system comprises as many DAPs as required to service each remote site, housed in a weatherproof housing with a built-in PSU and standby batteries.
Benefits include:
• Flexible engineering operation.
• Unlimited distance wirelessly.
• Low power operation with standby battery to report power outages.
• Alarm logging.
• Easy installation and maintenance.
• Option to preserve existing investment in PLCs.
• Does not interfere with existing control systems.
These benefits make the system ideally suited for any remote condition monitoring operation.
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