Advanced monitoring and diagnostics help a large-scale grain manufacturer improve its maintenance processes.
You never know what you might see while driving down a country road: a herd of grazing cattle, a quaint produce stand, or a beautiful beam of sunlight shining through massive towers on a grain farm. Looking at those picturesque storage bins in the haze of a mid-summer afternoon, you might not realize they can contain as much as $4 million worth of product. Imagine the impact on a farm or grain elevator and the safety issues for those working at the facility if something were to happen to the grain.
Delivering harvested grain to storage bins and ensuring that ideal conditions exist inside such units are two major components of a large-scale grain manufacturer’s operation.
The challenge
Delivering harvested grain to storage bins/silos and ensuring that ideal conditions exist inside such units are two major components of a large-scale grain-manufacturing operation. Once harvested, grain is moved from storage trucks or containers on the ground to the top of the large storage bins. From there, it is either dumped into a bin or transported across a conveyance system that connects multiple bins. These systems, which run across the tops of the storage bins, make it possible to fill multiple units from one conveyance system. Over time, the system’s many moving conveyor parts can fail or slip.
Moving the grain to the storage bin is only half the battle. The other half is ensuring that the product is properly stored.
Once grain has been safely transferred to a storage bin, temperature becomes a potential concern. If the temperature inside these bins is too high, it can cause issues with the grain quality. Factors such as an insect infestation or moisture, which causes fermentation, can contribute to temperature spikes. In addition, and in extreme cases, these high temperatures can also cause hot spots in the grain, which can lead to unexpected combustion inside the bin.
The solution
Ensuring that all bin systems—inside and outside—are running reliably and efficiently, and maintaining proper operating conditions, is essential to minimizing downtime and preventing losses. That’s why some advanced grain-storage facilities are implementing a combination of remote-monitoring software and sensors to provide in-depth insights into their operations. With this technology, they are able to monitor temperature increases inside grain bins, as well as component wear and overall operations on conveyance systems. Collected data provide a better understanding of how their systems are functioning and what aspects may require maintenance.
This was the case with a grain manufacturer with operations across the central U.S. Due to the size of the enterprise, diagnosing problems in conveyor systems or storage bins would be a time-consuming and costly process. The company chose to implement hazard- and temperature-monitoring solutions from TempuTech (Byhalia, MS), a provider and original-equipment manufacturer (OEM) of grain-management systems, to take its monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to the next level.
One of the biggest problems facing TempuTech’s services organization, however, was the amount of “windshield time” that it could take to complete the diagnostics process, obtain parts, and complete a repair for its customers. When a problem occurs at a customer’s facility, that relaxing, scenic country drive is soon replaced with multiple trips back and forth to figure out what’s wrong and to take the necessary steps to quickly get the operation back to normal.
First is the trip to the facility to determine the source of the issue, then back to get the right parts—or, in some instances, waiting on site for as many as two days for the necessary parts to be delivered—and finally, back to the site to begin the repair or replacement. All the while, grain-facility management is losing money from a shutdown.
To combat these problems, TempuTech selected GE’s Equipment Insight solution, powered by the cloud-based Predix diagnostics platform, to augment its existing offerings. Equipment Insight is an out-of-the-box remote monitoring and diagnostics solution designed to help OEMs and their end customers improve system performance, grow profits, and reduce operating costs. An Industrial Internet solution, it allows OEMs to securely collect and analyze machine data from intelligent devices in the field and to relay key information to their employees and end users. The system offers on-site viewing, virtual monitoring through a secure cloud environment from mobile devices or browsers, and the ability to control grain-transfer operations across a facility.
For TempuTech, Equipment Insight enables improved visibility into asset health and better monitoring capabilities of its solutions; ultimately streamlining its maintenance processes, providing better service and support, and enhancing their relationships with end customers. While its hazard- and temperature-monitoring systems already provided improved capabilities and valuable data for the grain-handling facility, supplementing them with GE’s Equipment Insight solution took the site’s monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to a higher level.
Together, the two companies offer customers a comprehensive solution capable of real-time, proactive alarming; automatic backup and redundancy features; mobile capability; customizable reports; and delivery of in-depth data when alarms are triggered.
With the temperature-monitoring system in place, standardized temperature reports can be sent directly to the manufacturing-facility operator on a daily basis so that grain temperature can be reduced as needed to protect the product from contaminations, infestations, and hot spots.
Moreover, with the hazard-monitoring system, the operator can now pinpoint problems in the conveyor systems, i.e., belt misalignment and slippage, speed variation, and overheated bearings, thus enabling maintenance to be performed as it is needed and before a large-scale shutdown is required.
Through the pairing of TempuTech’s temperature- and hazard-monitoring systems and GE’s Equipment Insight solution, grain-facility managers can analyze a combination of compiled information and turn it into actionable insight. This ability has helped TempuTech improve its services capabilities in that it is now able to identify problems faster and more efficiently while providing increased visibility into the health of a customer’s assets. It can also schedule service and maintenance before downtime occurs—before the grain manufacturer even knows there’s a problem.
With the data collected and analyzed by the solutions, TempuTech can show up onsite with the right parts in hand, the moment that an issue is detected, reducing windshield time for its employees and repair time and costs for its customers.
Diagnosing problems in grain conveyor systems can be a time-consuming and costly process.
The result
In leveraging GE’s Equipment Insight, TempuTech is transforming its business model from being a break/fix maintenance provider to a proactive partner, helping to eliminate unplanned downtime and increase productivity for its customers. Additionally, its pilot customer, the large-scale grain-handling operation, expects to improve its asset performance, reduce unplanned downtime, and improve decision-making effectiveness.
Based on this pilot implementation, TempuTech plans to offer an integrated system that controls all aspects of a grain-storage facility, i.e., one that combines different applications, devices, sensors, databases, and systems into one mobile-accessible solution capable of starting, monitoring, and stopping key processes, when needed, and creating preventive-maintenance reports.
With its own temperature- and hazard-monitoring systems and GE’s Equipment Insight, the company will be able to provide current and future customers with a solution capable of seamlessly connecting their machines, data, insights, and people. MT
GE’s Equipment Insight solution is part of the company’s Automation & Controls portfolio, which is part of GE Energy Connections, Atlanta. For more information, visit geautomation.com.
