Our smart solutions for plant engineering

Remote monitoring of industrial machines and systems via cellular - simple and cost-reducing

The Goal:

Reduction of maintenance and spare parts costs as well as avoidance of system downtimes through central monitoring and visualisation of relevant parameters with secure data communication. To avoid risks due to incorrect operation, the system control should not be accessed.

The Case:

As a service partner for its customers, a mechanical and plant engineer has the task of ensuring practically uninterrupted operation of the plant. It is important to maintain the systems in good time and to quickly remedy any errors that occur. This results in significant savings potential in two areas:

1. Predictive Maintenancee
A seal or a valve, for example, is no longer replaced after a fixed time interval, regardless of whether the machine has been used or not, but after a certain number of operating hours or a defined flow rate.

2. Condition Monitoring
There is no longer a wait until, for example, bearing damage occurs, but instead the increase in bearing temperature is measured and the impending error is recognised in advance.

In order to achieve this, it is necessary to centrally monitor and visualise suitable parameters of the systems, such as fill levels of operating materials and lubricants, temperatures of bearings and motors, etc. It would make sense to use additional independent as well as independently networked sensors. Because existing sensors, if they are available and appropriate at all, also always mean access to the control or the existing network, whereby there is at least the risk of intervention in the process flows.

The Task:

Connection of the sensors for recording the physical states
Secure transmission of the collected data
Visualisation of the data
Management of several hundred end devices in the field
Inexpensive and compact all-in-one solution with a small variety of devices and without complex installations

The IoTmaxx Solution:

The GW4101 4G LTE Gateway, optimised for the connection of sensors, is used. The extensive interfaces offer the possibility of directly connecting a wide variety of commercially available sensors without the need for additional devices such as interface converters, programmable controls or similar. The data is transmitted via cellular in the LTE 4G network. If the 4G network is weak locally, the GW4101 Gateway has an automatic fallback to 2G and 3G (as long as 3G is available)

A standardised connection is implemented on the open-source Linux system of the Gateway via the MQTT protocol to a server-based MQTT broker and a downstream database. The visualisation of sensor data takes place in the open source application Grafana.

Gateway