Condition Based Maintenance (CBM)
Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is becoming increasingly important due to the high demands on production availability and efficiency. The use of condition monitoring tools reduces maintenance costs and enhances process quality since maintenance is only performed after one or more indicators show that the equipment is going to fail, or its performance is deteriorating.
Many of the monitoring systems on the market are application specific and expensive so until now, condition monitoring has been complex and cost-intensive. Vibration for example is traditionally been sensed using piezoelectric accelerometers. While accurate and reliable, these accelerometers have some inherent problems like their difficulty to being mass-produced and their high source impedance. Cost is hereby thus a significant issue due to the price of the individual sensors and their associated signal conditioning units. MEMS-based (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) accelerometers provide a good alternative due to their small size, newer technology and low cost. The performance of these MEMS-based sensing elements has already been proved. More than a billion MEMS sensors have been used in automotive applications over the last 25 years and they have shown a high degree of quality and reliability. MEMS accelerometers are thus providing a practical solution for the deployment of smart sensing technology.
The condition monitoring sensors of iQunet are MEMS-based, battery powered and wireless making CBM practical and cost-effective. iQunet’s smart sensors provide programmable signal conditioning, signal processing and analysis, simple decision making and remote communication on top of the raw measurements (as can be seen in the case studies at the left).
