Maintworld 4/2019

INDUSTRY EVENT
Asset Performance 4.0:
New Technologies
Bring New Solutions
Maintenance is teamwork - always and everywhere – and because of this, Bemas
no longer considered it opportune to honour a single maintenance manager. That is
why the emphasis this year was on ‘projects’.
THE BRAND NEW ‘Asset Performance Awards’ were awarded to
interesting maintenance initiatives in three categories. It is no
surprise that ‘4.0’ was an important topic. After all, the global
evolution towards digitisation, Industry 4.0 and new technologies
open the doors to solutions that the maintenance world
has never thought possible. –
ArcelorMittal took home the Asset Performance 4.0 Award.
We embraced technological evolution from the outset, says
Andy Roegis, manager of industrial digitalization. The potential
for production as well as quality, maintenance and logistics
became clear fairly quickly.
Certainly, for our division, numerous new possibilities are
opening that allow us to carry out maintenance in a more focused
and efficient way, maintenance engineer Pieter Van den
Branden continues.
The achilles heel of production
At ArcelorMittal, the digital transformation revolves around,
among other things, increasing production reliability. The top
priority was the hot strip mill in the Ghent plant, a machine
that fulfils a crucial role.
It rolls slabs of steel of 23 cm to slabs of 1.5 mm thickness,
which are then transported to the rewinding zone via a conveyor
belt. There they are wound up into steel coils, says Pieter
Van den Branden.
Unfortunately, the hot strip mill is the Achilles heel of the
production. This sub-installation has 340 AC motors, each of
which controls a transport roller. And that’s where things often
go wrong: failures in the motor or the universal joint regularly
cause an unforeseen machine standstill. This causes the entire
production to come to a standstill. In addition, the plates are
often scratched and have passed over a defective transport
roller. In short, there is both a downtime and a quality cost!
Bringing together data sources
A logical answer to this problem was predictive maintenance. Yet
for years it proved impossible to put this idea into practice.
Ordinary periodic vibration measurements did not provide
enough data to define specific maintenance actions. In the
end, we resorted to current and voltage measurements. In addition,
we opened up the digitisation register further with the
intelligent (self-learning) SAM4 software from SemioticLabs.
This solution detects anomalies and generates warnings, even
weeks before the breakdown will occur. And our efforts are
paying off, because in the meantime the availability of the
roller has increased considerably, said Andy Roegis.
It is important to note that all monitoring systems are integrated,
Pieter Van den Branden continues.
The data from the ERP system are used to optimise the
planning of the maintenance teams. Conversely, the SAM4
software returns all data from monitoring and maintenance to
the ERP system. This is not so much about big data, but rather
about bringing together different data sources. In order to gain
additional knowledge to plan maintenance even better, he adds
Unseen opportunities
For Infrabel, the manager of the Belgian railway infrastructure
who also competed for the Award, Industry 4.0 is a strategic
necessity.
Although we are very active on the labour market, we have
been faced with a shrinking workforce for several years now,
project manager Sandrine Rauwoens states.
The influx of technically trained people is too small to cope
20 maintworld 4/2019