Q. What are the recent advances in compressor control and monitoring?
Over the last few years, compressor control and monitoring solutions have become modular and are now available as off-the-shelf solutions. This makes them easier to commission and deploy and more user-friendly. In the past, they were at least partly customer built and designed, which made them more expensive. With the solutions available off-the-shelf this has changed dramatically.
Q. How does Australia’s uptake of these solutions compare to other countries’?
My observation is that we lag behind some of the more advanced countries. We have a number of companies in Australia that I’m familiar with who have been using these systems for a number of years, but compared to the European countries there isn’t the same market penetration.
Q. Why do you think there is a lag in Australia?
I think there are a number of reasons, but the one I come across most often is the cost of energy and electricity and capital in Australia. In Europe, high electricity costs and comparatively lower costs of capital mean there is more incentive to invest in energy efficient equipment. The situation is changing in Australia and that has to do with the fact that more and more companies are becoming energy and carbon dioxide emissions conscious. As soon as a company looks at reducing their carbon footprint, invariably they start looking at compressed air systems which are the top energy consumers in factories.
Q. What are the main benefits of centralised control and remote monitoring?
You have to look at the total cost of producing compressed air. The main cost is energy; then maintenance; then capital; then indirect and direct internal costs such as supervision of the plant. With a central control system, you have the opportunity to improve total energy consumption. With the remote monitoring solution, you can have an impact on maintenance and supervision. Overall these systems reduce the total cost of producing compressed air.
Q. How many compressors does a company need to have to benefit from this new technology?
There are solutions where remote condition monitoring can be very cost effective even for one unit. When we talk about central control systems it starts to be interesting if you’ve got two or more compressors running simultaneously.
Q. How would you go about setting up one of these systems?
With central control, you have to start with an audit of your air demand. Typically you would require some expert advice to do that. This information, together with an understanding of how the current compressor installation runs to deliver this required flow, gives you a full picture of the current situation. Then you would calculate a simulation of how a compressor would deliver this required air flow with a central control system running a different configuration. It is thus possible to calculate what the savings potential would be by having the central control system.
To set up a remote condition monitoring system, customers need to understand what the internal process is in monitoring and supervising a compressor. Traditionally in a plant you would have a team of maintenance engineers and fitters who do daily checks on equipment. Many of our customers think about what they can do to reduce their costs and removing some of these routine checks is one way to go about this. With remote monitoring, you don’t have to physically stand next to the machine; you actually have operating parameters wherever you are on your desktop.
Q. How much does a remote monitoring system cost?
That depends on what level of remote condition monitoring a customer wants. There are systems that just notify certain mobile phone numbers by SMS if a machine shuts down. That’s not a very expensive thing to do. On the other hand, there are solutions where you can have a fully hosted system to analyse operating data over a certain period of time. This would be a more expensive solution, appropriate for companies with multiple sites.
Q. Where do you believe this technology will go next?
I believe communication between compressors and other parts of the plant will become simpler and easier. There will be standardisation around the Ethernet protocol as a means of communication. We will probably also see these off-the-shelf solutions incorporating more features to make them more straightforward and easier to integrate with existing DCS.
Biography
Daniel Schnyder is a qualified engineer with over 12 years of compressor experience. He has worked with US, European and Australian manufacturing industries.
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