As industrial businesses strive to reduce their energy use to be more sustainable and save on operational costs, ifm and its self-service IIoT platform, moneo offers an easy solution.
According to Freddie Coertze, the National IoT Business Manager for ifm Australia, moneo draws on all the data collected from an industrial power meter. This includes historical data and livestream analytics. The company then uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide insights that can be actioned immediately.
“Unlike other systems that only monitor power usage, moneo will measure voltage, current, power factor and harmonics,” said Coertze. “This data is commonly used to identify a lot of mechanical faults. Having these insights available can be hugely beneficial to an industrial business. For starters, you can determine your power factor and if this needs to be corrected.”
Power factor expresses the ratio of actual power used in a circuit compared to the power delivered. The higher the power factor, the more energy efficient you are. In comparison, a lower power factor indicates inefficiency.
Comparing power factor to beer in a glass
“If I explain this using the beer analogy, the true power factor is the useful beer liquid in the glass, whereas the total power delivered includes the useful beer liquid and the foam on top. The head on a beer, or the foam, represents lost or wasted power. It is energy being produced but not doing any work. If your circuit is 100 per cent efficient, then the power delivered to you is all useful. It’s the good stuff, the liquid part of the beer,” said Coertze.
If a business has a lot of ‘foam’, they are also potentially wasting a lot of money.
“Once you have corrected your power factor, moneo can be used to set a benchmark on that,” said Coertze. “That means you can set limits with moneo to provide ongoing monitoring. If something changes, moneo will flag you and let you know your power factor is out again. It will let you know about things like the condition of a machine, a degrading motor, or a short circuit.”
More than just adjusting the power factor
While the power factor is important, Coertze says that the moneo toolbox can provide a host of insights to help industrial businesses be more energy efficient.
“By having this extended visibility of the energy used at your site, you can actively optimise your system to save power,” he said. “The other aspect of this is the harmonics. This tells you what’s happening with your machines in real-time.”
However, Coertze stresses that moneo isn’t just a condition monitoring tool. It is a predictive maintenance platform that gives you information before any event. The point of difference is that moneo has been designed as an out-of-the-box, all-in-one solution that is easy to integrate with existing systems at an industrial operation.
“It comes with the hardware, software and predictive formulas included so that you just hook it up to your power meter, and it will give you insights straight away,” Coertze concludes. “It is self-service, and you can expand easily. I like to call it, ‘grow as you know.’ For example, you can start with your power meter but then expand into water tracking for water monitoring or temperature tracking. There are no limits as to what it can do. Whereas other suppliers can give you an energy monitoring platform, moneo can enable a successful predictive maintenance program across your entire facility.”
For more information, visit https://www.ifm.com/au/
Related Articles:
- Sustainability central to Hydroflux mission
- Internet of Water: A new era for water & IoT
- SUEZ unveils its new sustainable development goals