Every business strives for seamless operations with downtime causing minimal impact on a company’s bottom line.
With modern technological advances, it’s even easier to rectify some of the age-old headaches that maintenance teams must deal with to keep up with efficient operations.
Industry-focused IoT and monitoring devices designed to address painful traditional challenges, including lubrication and consistent asset monitoring, are revolutionising machinery maintenance.
Solving lubrication woes
Effective lubrication of rotating equipment is challenging in all industries. But in the world of food & beverage, compliance with essential hygiene requirements and the guaranteed need for zero cross-contamination is second-to-none.
But no matter the process’s difficulties, the correct lubrication of bearings must be achieved to ensure their longevity and smooth production.
Manual lubrication has many failings:
- Ensuring optimal greasing of the parts.
- Ensuring neither under nor over-greasing occurs.
- The need to close down production to reach the parts to lubricate.
- The risk of contamination during the process.
The answer lies in technology and automation. While this sounds very simple, it’s been somewhat challenging to find a solution that works, is cost-effective, simple to fit and wholly reliable.
This is where the Chesterton LubriCup has revolutionised the art of proper greasing. This automatic dispenser has been designed to deliver an exact amount of lubrication at the correct intervals. Always early enough, not a second too late, while ensuring that the right amount of grease is dispensed.
The LubriCup can eliminate the most common cause of premature bearing failure – over or under-greasing.
LubriCup can be easily installed to service single or multiple lube points. It brings reliability and efficiency to what is a historically haphazard process, no matter how diligent maintenance teams might be.
It’s an ideal solution for a variety of situations, including:
- Lubricating bearings in hazardous and/or difficult-to-access locations
- Where human entry risks introducing contaminants
- Removing time-consuming and repetitive tasks (not to mention a high likelihood of error) from humans, leaving them free to carry out more creative maintenance elements that require free thought
- Remote lubrication control options
LubriCup is suitable for a wide variety of applications. It’s available in nitrogen-driven and electro-mechanical forms, as well as an intuitive vibration-sensing option that’s designed for standby equipment. The new PLC unit can provide SCADA / PLC-driven signals to provide fresh lubricant to your assets’ bearings, all from the control room.
Unearthing the impossible
Another typical pain point that won’t come as any surprise is decreased mean time before failure (MTBF). This has been the bane of the production lines since the industrial revolution.
For whatever reason, a failure might occur, such events are, at best, inconvenient. At worst, they can be catastrophic – halting production in its tracks and being responsible for the two words that are enough to send a shudder down the spine of any food & beverage professional… a ‘product recall’.
Recalls don’t only cost a considerable amount but reduce customer confidence, shareholder goodwill and industry credibility. While every seal, bearing and associated part has an expected lifespan, there’s always the exception to the rule, not to mention the variables that affect virtually all food & beverage production processes – namely, heat, vibrations and abrasive media.
If only there were a real-time way to monitor the asset operating conditions easily.
Enter Chesterton Connect. A smart device that, once installed, automates and upgrades what has historically been an impossible process. That of continual process monitoring for pumps and sealing systems.
Imagine accessing the exact health of an operating system 24/7/365. This is exactly what Chesterton Connect brings to the table. It can provide you with process pressures, temperatures, equipment vibration and surface temperatures, and this clever little IoT gadget will instantly warn you if any levels move outside predefined parameters.
With data like this at their fingertips, maintenance teams no longer have to guesstimate agitators, pumps, mixers and other rotating equipment longevity. Instead, they can accurately calculate when inspection, repairs and replacements must be performed.
Preventative maintenance has long been a difficult (and often expensive if you get it wrong) process. The simple-to-fit Chesterton Connect and its associated app and software have brought the futureproofing of assets through calculated preventative actions to the mainstream.
Reliable synergy for optimal performance
While both LubriCup and Chesterton Connect are excellent tools alone, they add a whole new degree of automation when used in tandem. With reliable lubrication, the chances of equipment parameters being breached fall dramatically. When you add the watchful eye of Chesterton Connection into the mix, we enter a whole different league.
This is game-changing in the food & beverage world, where the tiniest delays can be catastrophic to already over-squeezed margins. Those already embracing this increasingly automated landscape are experiencing highly positive results.
From blending machines to canned fruit processing, and bakery cooling to high-temperature shrink wrapping, advanced IoT tools, such as LubriCup and Chesterton Connect, are working to increase both output and profit margins.
Like it or not, efficiency is no longer solely in human hands. But the choice to take advantage of the technology certainly is. Early adopters stand to improve production today and show customers and industry professionals that they are a force to be reckoned with, creating a bright future for the company, employees, and customers alike.
To discover more and contact on of our experts today.
Chesterton Customseal is specialised in elastomeric polymer seals. We offer our full range of high-performance seals directly or through our distribution channel partners. Standard Chesterton® products portfolio includes Mechanical Seals, Packing & Gaskets, Industrial Lubricants and MRO products, ARC Industrial Coating and are offered only through our distribution partners, which are strategically located to support the Asia Pacific market.
Chesterton, a leader in equipment sealing and reliability, has released its next IoT innovation – an easy-to-install sensor and app that helps industrial teams increase uptime of rotating equipment: discover Chesterton Connect™.
Through our distributors’ network, we work with companies across all major industries to help you achieve higher equipment reliability, efficiency, and compliance levels. We increase the overall competitiveness of our customers by helping to solve real-world equipment and process issues to reduce their costs and increase their profit margins.