Low-Cost Industrial Monitoring Platform for Energy Efficiency and Optimized Plant Productivity

Abstract

Optimizing complex industrial processes can help improve overall productivity, minimize down-times, and reduce operational costs. Traditionally plant managers have accomplished this by installing sub-metering devices for specific processes. However, sub-metering devices are expensive, require complex installation procedures, and need customization on the factory floor to get the data to the enterprise cloud. Furthermore, interpreting the acquired data and implementing suitable actions require significant subject matter expertise and a comprehensive understanding of the loads' energy consumption profiles and their exposure to power quality disturbances. As a result, this is often prohibitively expensive for small or medium scale facilities. This paper proposes a novel architecture for gaining actionable insights from the various processes being monitored. At the heart of the system is an ‘intelligent terminal block’ (ITB) that gathers process specific data such as voltage, current, and power consumption and performs edge computing in a decentralized fashion. From the acquired data, the ITB can help minimize downtime through fault diagnostics and predictive maintenance, provide situational awareness by recording power quality disturbances and their effect on equipment, and enable cost savings through energy efficiency insights like CVR factor estimation. The ITB itself requires minimal customization on the factory floor and uses existing communication back-hauls to report these insights to the cloud, capable of working with intermittent connectivity. This architecture allows plant managers to economically obtain significant insights into the plant's operation.