Motor protection made easy with moneo wizard
Imagine having Gandalf protect your industrial motors. It would be a formidable force to reckon with. Well, according to Freddie Coertze, the ifm moneo Data Science Toolbox has a wizard that can provide just that type of protection – by predicting motor issues through the use of advanced vibration analysis (AVA).
“A unique aspect of moneo is that this wizard can help users determine the vibration limits of their motor and predict failure well in advance, so there is enough time to act,” says Coertze, the National IoT Business Development Manager for ifm Australia. “It’s a great way for an industrial business of any size to start implementing a predictive maintenance plan – without the fuss and complexity that is often associated with this process. Because you’re starting just with the motor monitoring.”
Unlike other condition monitoring solutions, moneo has been designed for ease-of-use. It is a self-service IIoT platform where the hardware, software and smarts – which are predictive formulas created by artificial intelligence (AI) – come in one package. The AVA wizard is a tool that comes with moneo and can be used as a simple way to start monitoring and protecting motors.
“It’s very easy to set up. The wizard tool will talk you through the steps so you can do everything yourself without the need for an IT or analytics expert,” says Freddie. “It’s a matter of connecting your sensor, dragging and dropping that into the moneo dashboard, selecting the motor configuration, and then moneo has an inbuilt AI tool that will create baselines for you in regards to what the acceptable limits of motor vibration will be for that configuration.”
Users can then start seeing the vibration levels of their motor installation on the dashboard. The set limits suggested by moneo appear as red and yellow dots to indicate if the motor is running outside of its determined limits.
“If vibration levels exceed the yellow, you have early notification that your motor needs attention and if it reaches red, it goes into alarm,” explains Freddie. “It’s the difference between having a warning that something is about to fail and having early notification that is predicting a failure later on. Essentially, this wizard gives you time to fix motor issues before they become bigger problems. As we say, to protect, you need to predict and this wizard helps you do that.”
Importantly, moneo has been designed to keep it simple for users, but also to expand as requirements change.
“You can extend on this form of motor protection by adding a device that provides a more intensive vibration and into other aspects of predictive maintenance as well,” says Freddie. “But if we think about businesses just wanting a starting point, this is a great way to begin. You might have an asset such as a conveyor where if it breaks down due to a motor failure the whole production of a facility might come to a halt. So having this tool will let you know in advance if the motor has issues such as if it’s misaligned or it’s out of specification, and you can save it before any event like that occurs.”