BEARING DOWN How The Internet of Things is Reducing Factory Downtime
ll manufacturers have been there: A ball bearing in a gearbox suddenly fails and production comes to a standstill, with products sitting on the line, workers left with nothing to do, and thousands of dollars wasted until a replacement is made.
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Jack Gilmer, West Michigan territory manager for Dodge Industrial, refers to the Smart Sensors as “like a FitBit” and emphasizes the power of the data collection.
“Downtime is the bane of every manufacturing plant in the world,” said Ben Shine, sales account manager at the Grand Rapids branch of Motion, a subsidiary of Genuine Parts Co. “Businesses have historically accepted that as a part of making product.”
“As you are collecting trending data, each bearing creates its own signature,” Gilmer said. “Every bearing doesn’t operate at the same temperature and vibration, depending on where it is installed. Over time, it creates a baseline.”
The average manufacturer deals with 800 hours of downtime a year, with costs ranging anywhere from $500 per hour into the thousands, depending on the products on the line. According to a study conducted by MIT, an estimated $240 billion is lost annually in industries across the United States because of downtime for repairs on failed manufacturing equipment. Half of those failures are due to improper bearing maintenance.
Each company that uses Smart Sensors owns its data outright, and data are encrypted as recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Personnel can view the data on a smartphone, tablet or computer.
Now, thanks to Smart Sensors, downtime may be a thing of the past. Dodge Industrial, a leading manufacturer of mounted bearings, enclosed gearing, and power transmission products, worked with ABB Group to develop the Dodge Smart Sensor five years ago. The sensors are small, about 3-inches tall, and fit on a variety of gearboxes and mounted bearings. They monitor assets for temperature and vibration, aggregating real-time data that is pushed through a gateway via Bluetooth into the cloud and into an app, which alerts users to anomalies that indicate a need for maintenance before a failure is imminent. One gateway can collect data from 50 sensors on a shop floor. This interconnectivity is called the Industrial Internet of Things, and it’s revolutionizing the shop floor by giving machines a means to “talk” to workers by letting them know when a critical component is on the verge of failing. 12
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Mock-up dashboards from Dodge show what looks like an EKG reading as the sensors track the temperature and vibration data. The interface is intuitive and designed for ease of use. It communicates the health of a part with the classic traffic light sysMANUFACTURING tem: Green for tip-top shape, yellow to alert DOWNTIME BY something may be amiss, and red to alert THE NUMBERS an impending failure. Systems also can use advanced algorithms to direct maintenance endeavors and establish protocols.
800
is the average number of hours a manufacturer deals with each year.
$500
is the hourly cost of downtime for manufacturers
$240B
lost annually across the U.S. because of manufacturing downtime
50%
of manufacturing failures due to improper bearing maintenance
Motion distributes replacement components for machines as well as the Dodge Smart Sensors. As such, Shine is familiar with the pain a sudden bearing failure can cause a company. “A lot of manufacturing plants, when they have a failure, it is a critical failure,” he said. “Everything stops, the line shuts down. You may have product on the line that isn’t salvageable. You may have a product that has a dwell or set time. It’s extremely expensive.” Manufacturers typically perform maintenance on a schedule, but when a bearing VISIT ADVANCEDMANUFACTURINGEXPO.COM
