Leading industrial and automotive supplier Schaeffler launches ‘OPTIME’ for comprehensive and automated condition monitoring of all process-critical plant assets. It is a highly scalable wireless IoT solution, capable of easily integrating several hundred assets in a single day and lowering cost by up to 50% compared with manual offline measurement. The India launch of OPTIME is a part of the overall launch in the entire Asia Pacific region.

OPTIME can be installed and initial operation carried out without any previous condition monitoring experience. The vibration sensors are attached to the monitored assets by means of screws or adhesive, and are activated by the corresponding app, which connects to them via near-field communication (NFC). All installed sensors communicate autonomously with each other and the gateway, thereby forming a dedicated mesh network, which transmits machine KPI data, raw vibration, and temperature data to the Schaeffler IoT Hub via the gateway. The hub analyses the data and displays the findings in the app that supports a wide variety of end devices commonly used by maintenance teams and plant operators. Alternatively, the analysis results can be made available for integration into the customer’s own IT environment via a REST API.

The app provided along with Schaeffler OPTIME presents trends in graph form and visualizes the severity of incidents using traffic light colours, alarm states, and other information. Assets can be grouped according to users’ requirements, and their condition can be presented in a range of user group-specific views. It provides several weeks’ early warning of damage to machine components such as electric motors, fans, and pumps, in addition to early warning of imbalances, misalignments, and knocking.

“The impact of unplanned downtimes are far more damaging than revenues alone, and brings forth multiple challenges in any manufacturing or processing unit. For cost reasons, permanently installed continuous condition monitoring systems are typically used only for production machines that are directly process-critical. Therefore, in process and automation industries, it is not uncommon for up to 95% of all assets in a production facility to be either totally unmonitored or monitored only periodically by means of route-based, manual measurements. With Schaeffler OPTIME, however, comprehensive and automated condition monitoring is now a cost-effective proposition for maintenance personnel and facility operators,” explained Harsha Kadam, CEO, Schaeffler India and President Industrial Business.

“With OPTIME, in-house maintenance crews and external service contractors receive specific recommendations on the remedial steps required, so they can easily plan their maintenance work, manpower requirements, and spare parts procurement in a timely and cost-efficient manner.”

For more information: www.schaeffler.com