ABSTRACT

CONDITION BASED MAINTENANCE - DRIVES AS A SENSOR TO ENABLE THE MONITORING OF THE OVERALL SYSTEM

In the context of the digital revolution and Industry 4.0, comprehensive data collection and analysis are necessary to identify problems at an early stage and plan suitable countermeasures and maintenance work. This means that unplanned system downtimes can usually be avoided and the availability of production lines increased, the condition based maintenance strategy aims to
achieve exactly this goal. This principle offers many advantages over other corrective and preventive maintenance concepts. Among other things, unnecessary costs due to system downtime or increased wear can be saved.
However, data are not always available and most of the time is hard to interpret and correlate the several variables in the system, making it difficult to elaborate thresholds and warnings that actually track issues at an early stage.
Nevertheless, a condition-based monitoring (CBM) that maintain the systems proactively can be easily performed by the Variable Frequency Drive (VFD), which is responsible to drive the motor and load, knowing very well how the overall system should perform. The ability of the drive to act as a smart sensor, makes it a natural choice when implementing condition monitoring. The VFD can collect data from a wide variety of sources. To do this, it combines signals from internal and external sensors, such as vibration and pressure sensors, and with its edge intelligence is able to store valuable information in the device or in the cloud and/or send the evaluation results to the EndUser’s internal system.

BIO

Riccardo Melotti is an engineer specializing in automation and control, who graduated in Bologna in 2002. After graduating, he began his career as an Application and Service Engineer in various multinational companies, operating mainly in the Food & Beverage, Logistics and Automotive sectors. In 2012 he began his experience in Danfoss SRL, Drives division, as Service Manager
and Business Developer, managing both the development of the "service business" and the execution of services for frequency converters / drives in Italy, Greece and Israel.