44 Condition Monitoring
Keeping a sharp eye on critical systems Renew spoke to Matt Fletcher, Managing Director of Fletcher Moorland, to find out how Meerkat, his company’s wireless condition monitoring system, is saving time and money for a facilities management company.
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ompleted in 2018, the London-based commercial skyscraper, the Scalpel, is 190m high and comprises 38 floors. Naturally, the facilities management (FM) company looking after the building is keen to ensure its tenants are comfortable. A complex HVAC system manages the interior environment, and this must remain operational 100% of the time, with all efforts made to avoid system failures or breakdowns. In other buildings managed by the FM company, there is a planned maintenance programme designed to ensure system parts and components are checked, and where necessary replaced, before there is any chance of failure. But the company recognised that a condition-based maintenance approach would be more effective – not only from a cost perspective but also from the quality of the building’s environment. With maintenance staff only required when a need was identified, they could be freed up for other work. Plus, components costs could be reduced with parts replaced less frequently, only when they demonstrated a reduction in performance. It was the Meerkat solution from Fletcher Moorland that the FM company chose for its building, as the company’s Managing Director, Matt Fletcher, explained: “With the project out to tender, we were approached by the building’s facilities team who had heard about Meerkat and were keen to find out about the system. “Many condition monitoring systems are highly complex, and it can require a deep understanding of vibration analysis to use them properly. We intentionally designed Meerkat to be very simple from a user’s point of view. We took a demo system to the site and left it online for a few weeks so the facilities company could get a feel for it. They loved it, and it was indeed the simplicity that won us the contract.” The system installed at the Scalpel has 158 sensors, or points – sensing vibration, temperature, and where needed, speed output from the inverter drives. Some assets have more than one sensor attached; for example, a large pump may need two sensors on the pump itself and two on the motor. How this is set up is where the expertise of the installation team comes into play. Fletcher Moorland’s installation team are vibration analysis
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certified and use a combination of their experience, and the parameters set out in ISO 10816 to establish how best to monitor each of the assets. “While self-installation, plug-and-play systems are available, understanding where to place the sensors will make a huge difference to the performance of the monitoring system,” continued Matt. SIMPLIFIED CONNECTIVITY One of the advantages of the Meerkat system is that it is wireless. In the Scalpel, there is a plant room in the basement and one on the top floor. This would require vast amounts of cable – challenging to route through the building and adding to the project cost. Each point is connected to a network node powered by a battery that lasts on average two years. All the
A FLEXIBLE SOLUTION In an automotive manufacturer’s paint plant, the paint would build up on the ventilation system’s fan impellers, sending them out of balance. To avoid this leading to motor failure and unplanned downtime, the manufacturer needed maintenance teams to regularly inspect the fans. As well as the time it took the maintenance team, this also caused a degree of disruption to production. A Meerkat system was designed and installed at the site, monitoring the fan’s vibration. With the maintenance team only needing to get involved when an alarm is triggered by the system detecting a threshold breach, significant maintenance hours have been saved, resulting in reduced production downtime. www.theaemt.com
