machinery | Maintenance
together, maintaining centreline distance to confirm that they are correctly configured with no interference between elements. For an extruder to perform well the
stability of the gearbox is critical. Steer recommends an oil-cooled gearbox and says the oil lubrication system must include heat exchanger, oil filter and oil circulation pump. “Protections must be built into the system to prevent operation under low oil levels, high oil temperature and low oil pressure,” Gowda says. “All these must be monitored daily and today there are in-built sensors that will create alerts whenever the performance of the gear box is affected.” Gowda also recommends daily checks
on consumption of lubricants; leakage of lubricant; gear case oil reservoir; condensa-
Above: The latest version of the Senseye software
includes a Risk of Failure app that runs on smart phones
tion inside gear oil (which could result in oil foam or sludge); condition of oil; and stability of lubricant. Checks should also be carried out to determine if the oil reservoir needs cleaning. Magog Industries, which has been producing screws
and barrels since the late 1970s, highlights its wear resistant hard facing for screws, which is applied to screw flights by a TIG welding process using welding rods incorporating molybdenum, tungsten carbide, chromium, vanadium, and other metals. Hard faced screws, together with bimetallic twin barrels “have dealt a mortal blow to the rapid wearing of screws and barrels,” says Sales Manager Martyn Denzel. Despite these improvements in screw wear resist-
ance, maintenance remains essential. Denzel explains that as the clearance between screw and barrel increases, the screws will begin to rotate eccentrically, putting them under undue pressure. This can result in screw break, which can reverberate through the extruder and may cause damage to the gearbox. Output will also suffer, as material begins to flow back over the flights and hang up in the barrel. “Regular maintenance is the answer to obviating these problems, but all too often the production people are at odds with the maintenance department and, therefore, the machine doesn’t get released to maintenance for them to check the screws and barrels as regularly as it should be,” he says.
Remaining useful life Software company Senseye has launched a new generation of predictive maintenance software, which it says allows Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of machines to be easily viewed by maintenance staff. “This empow- ers maintainers and their managers to quickly see
26 COMPOUNDING WORLD | April 2017
for how long assets can be expected to keep performing as they should and what they will need to do to avoid unplanned downtime,” says company CTO Robert Russell. Senseye,—which describes itself as a provider of “Uptime-as-a-Service” and has been operating for three years mostly in the automotive sector—says version 2.3 of its automatic condition monitoring and prognostics software brings RUL calculations to all customers “whether they operate ten or 10,000 assets.” It claims the Senseye product is unique in offering automated condition monitoring combined with RUL analysis. The system has been installed on various extrusion and injection moulding equipment but not, so far, on compounding plant. Knowing the RUL of machinery helps companies to
implement cost-effective predictive maintenance, typically allowing for a 10-40% reduction in maintenance costs and downtime reduction of 30-50%, Russell claims. “Remain- ing Useful Life has been an academic focus until now, accessible only to those with extensive data engineering skills,” he says. “Senseye’s technology makes it acces- sible to all. Its automated analysis is designed to be easy to use by maintenance teams and managers.” Senseye co-founder Alexander Hill says the
software picks up data from, in most cases, sensors already incorporated into processing equipment. “We acquire data and build a model based on that. We look at what is normal and what is not, effectively creating a fingerprint of failure,” he explains. The software is said to be well suited to use in
operations running numerous similar machines, where it can compare data across lines to assess if one is deviating from the norm. All data is stored in the cloud, so it is possible for one system to learn based on data from a system operating at another location, or even at another processor. Hill says the company has pre- empted concerns over loss of confidential data. “We never take raw data,” he says, “we only take interesting features, for example a change in electrical current consumption over time. There is no way that one client can access another client’s data.”
Click on the links for more information: ❙
www.leistritz.com ❙
www.icmasangiorgio.it ❙
www.centuryextrusion.com ❙
www.extruder-experts.com ❙
www.feddem.com ❙
www.entek.com ❙
www.kraussmaffeiberstorff.com ❙
www.steerworld.com ❙
www.magog.co.uk ❙
www.senseye.io
www.compoundingworld.com
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