Challenge:
A large beer manufacturer uses steam extensively for their heat kettles, brew house, flash pasteurizer, keg room, glycol heater, sucrose system, heat exchanger and varioclean crp. Trap failures mean more than just lost energy, they could very quickly result in lost product.
Detection was so integral to their processes that they were inspecting their traps on a weekly basis. This took a staff member up to 5 hours each week (costing approx $2000 a month in wages and lost productivity). They calculated that a large failure would ruin product if it failed for longer than 24 hours. Each year they had up to 3 of those undetected failures with a loss of approx $100K product each time.
$2,000 per month in wages plus $1000 in month in energy savings is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of money saved
Solution:
Pulse Steam Trap Monitors were placed on 163 steam traps, gateways installed and data is now recorded constantly and sent to the AI diagnostics software. Failure alerts were set up to be sent to maintenance and brewery teams.
In the first month a failure was detected and repaired with no down time necessary and no lost product. Additional failures in the future are not a worry as the system is in place and supported 24x7. They plan on rolling out the solution to their other locations over the next 12 months.
"It literally broke my heart to have to
throw out all that beer several times a year"
Benefits:
Failures are detected right away so no product ever needs to be ruined
The worker who used to do inspections every week is now happily overseeing a new project
They are enjoying significant energy savings in addition to the production values
Maintenance workers don’t have to be on site at all times or glued to a screen with analytics as they are emailed with failure alerts when a failure occurs
User training on Pulse AI diagnostics system is very quick and easy
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