Water & Wastewater Asia May/June 2019

INSIGHT | 43
IntelliSAW is well known as one of the leading providers of systems that protect electric power transmission and distribution equipment
by measuring and monitoring temperature, humidity, and partial discharge using advanced sensor and analytic technologies. In 2015,
the company was acquired by Emerson.
Now part of Emerson’s Rosemount portfolio of measurement and analytical technologies, the IntelliSAW suite of predictive maintenance and
continuous monitoring systems enables users to reduce maintenance costs and increase their quality of service by providing continuous
real-time temperature data. The non-invasive systems also increase personnel safety and protect equipment from significant damage.
Water & Wastewater Asia recently sat down with Jay Ganson, director of products at Emerson Automation Solutions, to find out more about
IntelliSAW and what it can do to distribute critical electrical power transmissions in plants to avoid failures in critical electrical assets.
Q: Could you describe IntelliSAW to us in detail?
JG: The IntelliSAW product line-up of Emerson focuses on providing
continuous monitoring of electrical infrastructure to any industrial
site, including wastewater treatment plants. In most electrical sites,
I mean every site, we use low-voltage everywhere.
Oftentimes, the electrical delivery which is critical to making sure
everything works is under-invested or ignored. If you look at the
maintenance budget across a lot of plants and operations, one of
the last things to get attention and investment dollars is the power
delivery.
Our solution is designed to retrofit into existing power delivery
equipment and monitor the three most important elements of, or
leading indicators of failure for electrical equipment. Our system is
designed to monitor each one of these points and let operators know
of any issues prior to any failure. We’re bringing the familiar IoT world
into the underinvested area of electrical delivery inside the building; so
we focus on balance of plants, delivery, in addition to sort of a process.
Q: How exactly does IntelliSAW work?
JG: The way that our sensors work is by using a surface acoustic
wave technology. It’s a long-proven technology, but using it in this
application is relatively new — as in the way that we’re using it to
monitor electrical switch gear. It has a lot of neat properties that
make it attractive for this space. Adding sensors, getting data, making
decisions based on that data and improving throughput, that’s a hot
trend, but it’s only starting now to get into the electrical delivery side.
The technology choice of surface acoustic wave that we’re using is
a unique fit for electrical assets. It’s a completely analogue solution,
and the reason that that’s kind of important is that it is very costly to
shut down electricity in a building, so we want to do it as few times
as possible. Our solution doesn’t have a battery, it’s not battery
powered, it has no electrical components that could fail in the powered
equipment.
And that’s important because you don’t want to have to go in and
replace a battery periodically or do maintenance. We’re designed to
be installed for 20 years and be left alone for the life of the asset,
which you can’t say about most powered electronics – there are so
many things that could fail in them and by having it completely RF
and analogue inside the high voltage area, we can eliminate the risk
of that failure. We’re relying on basic physics: when things get hot,
they expand, when things get cold, they contract, so we’re monitoring
that type of basic principle of physics using analogue technology,
sort of an old-school approach to a new problem.
Q: How will IntelliSAW help extend the lifespan of plants?
JG: In plants there are signs that old equipment is failing, and the
problem right now is a lot of people don’t actually have a monitor for
those signs. They leave them out and operate until they smell smoke,
which is already a failure hot enough to create smoke, and that’s a
problem. That issue should have been caught well in advance, but
there just isn’t any sensors in any of this equipment.. No one really
knows when that equipment will fail. Is that five years from now,
15 years or a week?
Electricity is normally incredibly reliable, and so it’s often
underinvested — but when you have data, you might see a
degradation of performance; such as a motor might slow down or
give way, and you have some kind of warning that it’s the end of its
life. With electrical assets you don’t really see that often, so people
don’t think about replacing it until there’s a big failure.
For electrical assets, they’re not digital for the most part, they’re old
school, electro-mechanical things that people don’t expect to fail.
And they work reliably — it’s almost as if it’s a service, but not the
necessary equipment behind that, so you depreciate it. And once
it’s depreciated even after 10 years, if you can get 15 or 20 years
out of it, then it’s great. We find that lots of operators will run their
equipment much longer than the expected life of the asset, at least
for the manufacturer.
Water & Wastewater Asia • May / June 2019