Industrial HVAC, Predictive Maintenance + Energy Efficiency
Case Study
Discover how Factory One improved HVAC energy efficiency, maintenance regimes and delivered big results.
The problem.
Large Industrial HVAC is expensive, with costs coming from energy consumption, efficiency and support issues related to maintenance requirements, and the need to be always in working-order to meet customer demands.
Owners expect more from suppliers than temperature control and simple service contracts – they’re demanding deeper insights into energy efficiency management and HVAC predictive maintenance to prevent failures.
The solution.
We helped our client to collect real-time data from HVAC PLCs, weather reports and 4G energy meters, combining data sets to identify new performance metrics and maintenance insights. As HVAC types vary, the key features of our solution are flexible.
Bringing together real-time energy and efficiency data.
Defining what data to collect is critical
In order to create the solution we started by identifying the data needed to deliver these metrics. In this solution this included:
- Energy consumption
- Power factor
- Current and predicted temperature and humidity
- Operating hours and CO₂ as a proxy for occupancy
- Filter pressure
- Fan speeds
- Operating status
Initial goals of the solution
The first goal of the solution was to focus on connecting to the meters, PLCs and external weather service to collect data in the Dynamix platform in a consistent and reliable manner, as well as ensuring data quality and integrity, and configured a solution with the following features:
- Monitor critical operational data received from the equipment via a web-based system
- Ensure device management monitoring for was set in place
- Define business logic for the application to meet the business objectives
- Provide alarm and alert notifications via email or SMS messages
- Start collecting historical data to enable energy consumption forecasting
- Provide the right dashboards to the right users with the right insights
- Test the application, making sure all of the above goals are met, based on the below solution architecture.
Testing.
Before setting the solution live, we tested four critical aspects of the solution:
1) Security
The Dynamix platform is built with security as a top priority and our proprietary security architecture ensures that data is secure at all points of the environment.
The solution includes data encryption in transit from device-to-cloud, as well as device authentication; security (Bearer) tokens; SSL, AES and RSA encryption; as well as additional device security checks done via automated polling.
2) Connectivity
Data from HVAC PAC PLCs is sent to LV power meters over MODBUS. The LV meter transmits data from the PAC and meter to the Rayven cloud via a 4G connection. Weather data is accessed via a Web API, whilst additional system metadata is added directly through data entry screens.
3) Data integrity
Your ability to make the right decisions is highly reliant on the integrity of your data. Making sure that you have reliable connections means that your data is always up-to-date and that you can rely on it, giving you the confidence to make critical business decisions in real-time based on it. As part of implementation, we tested and ensured that the raw data matched what was being seen in the dashboards and enabled back-fill capabilities just in case communication ever went down.
4) Industrial data science
The objective of the exploratory data analysis was to identify trends in the data, which included:
- Energy usage patterns compared with temperature and humidity
- Maintenance and failure alerts.
What’s next?
We are gathering data that will help us to build models of energy forecasting and HVAC predictive maintenance to deliver further financial and time savings.
Key features of our Industrial HVAC, Predictive Maintenance + Energy Efficiency solution:
- Energy monitoring - Continuous monitoring of energy consumption including power factor, current, voltage, and frequency.
- Alarms and alerts - Receive immediate SMS and email alerts for energy alarms, PAC warnings and alarms or when any metric crosses your preset thresholds.
- Complete history - Even if a device can’t connect due to network issues, you can rely on the automated backfill to retrieve device history and fill the gaps in the historical data set.
- Predictive maintenance - Identify when filter pressures are rising, when system checks fail, when compressor motors start to misbehave and take proactive action.
- Issue management - Ensure that there is a process in place to have the right people respond based on agreed protocols.
- Automated reporting - Create custom reporting dashboards and schedule them to be sent at any periodic time schedule to any specific user or user group.
Real business outcomes driven by our Industrial HVAC, Predictive Maintenance + Energy Efficiency solution:
- Lower cost of maintenance - With centralized, continuous real-time monitoring, you can avoid the need to visit sites to monitor critical performance metrics and alerts and proactively maintain your PACs.
- Better resource utilization - Sending technicians to monitor equipment or to fix-as-fail is not a good use of your technicians’ time or your money. Send technicians out when they are needed with specific purpose in mind.
- Less downtime - Centralized, continuous real-time monitoring allows you to proactively repair and maintain equipment, improving uptime and customer service.
- Reduce energy consumption - Compare PAC performance across a site or across an entire fleet to learn what makes some units more efficient than others.
- Greater predictability - You can understand the impacts of 3rd party variables on costs and predict expenditure across different machines, sites and businesses.
- Fault detection - You can detect a fault immediately, enabling you to dispatch maintenance crews and fix machines before potentially triggering broader failures.
Get started with your own transformation today, fast and affordably.
Factory One's easy-to-use solution, complete with ready-to-deploy modules that can improve every aspect of your manufacturing operations, will give you all the abilities you need, plus much more, in weeks with no hidden-costs.
Speak to us today to get started.