Wireless Sensors Keep Production in Check

As industrial bakeries try to meet rising demand with fewer employees, remote monitoring via wireless environmental and equipment sensors offers a solution that can help them operate more efficiently, prevent unplanned downtime related to equipment problems and manage employees and production processes more safely.  

Wireless sensors are now small enough to fit in the smallest of spaces, have batteries that can last for years and are designed to securely and automatically connect to a gateway that relays sensor data to the cloud for storage and analysis. These characteristics make them a good fit for bakeries that seek to maintain or increase productivity without a large capital expenditure on smart equipment or a time-consuming, expensive wired-sensor installation process.

The challenges of recent years have had a lasting impact on the economy and major industries. These disruptive events have been a catalyst for an accelerated move towards cloud-based solutions, increasing the need for monitoring off premise, and emphasizing the need for accurate data and analytics to adapt to changing environments faster, resulting in businesses more nimble in how they operate and evolve through uncertainty.

Plant managers are always looking for more efficiency, lower costs and better quality. But many managers have to work toward these goals using plant and equipment monitoring systems that are 10 years old – or older.  

A lot has changed during the past decade when it comes to monitoring systems. Today’s IIoT-connected, AI-supported systems offer advantages in cost, implementation, scalability and capabilities that simply weren’t possible a decade ago.

Although passive monitoring devices such as data loggers are commonly used within the industry, companies are finding that moving to real-time solutions not only improve business practices, it also provides insights that were simply unknown previously. Such a move allows for preventative control instead of passive management.

Vibration Sensors

Monitoring equipment for early signs of deterioration so that maintenance activity can be better planned, while reducing downtime and costs can be achieved through a widely used measurement for condition monitoring – vibration. This is particularly important in continuous process and manufacturing plants, where failure and downtime can be extremely costly. Swift Sensors offers such a solution, which can be used to identify a number of faults in rotating machinery. 

Wireless vibration sensors installed on equipment like ingredient handling systems, mixers, conveyors and packaging machinery can help bakery managers benchmark and improve efficiency by reviewing historical data to see how long each machine ran over a certain period of time.

Another way to make use of the data provided by this type of sensors is to look at the vibration amplitude of each piece of equipment. Motors, pumps and other mechanical items have an ideal vibration range that they should operate within. Using that range to set parameters can allow managers to generate data reports that show when and for how long pieces of equipment are operating outside their ideal range. This can help highlight issues like equipment overloading that can affect productivity and the quality of the finished goods, and even help schedule preventive maintenance that reduces downtime.

You can read the rest of this article in the Summer issue of Asia Pacific Baker & Biscuit magazine, which you can access by clicking here.