WEIR Group has developed Internet of Things technology which will give the engineering giant greater insight into the performance of its equipment in the mining industry, ultimately improving the efficiency of its clients’ operations.
Chief executive Jon Stanton said 15 product lines in the firm’s minerals division have been incorporated into the Synertrex platform, with Weir now in the process of rolling out the technology to its customer base around the world.
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Speaking on the sidelines of the company’s annual meeting, Mr Stanton said: “It’s still early stages. We’re starting to collect the data and the idea is we build a big data reservoir that will then give us information that we can work with, and tell us things that we don’t know.
“Then we start to write algorithms and use analytics to potentially improve the performance of our products [and] tell things to our customers about the efficiency of their process that they don’t know today. We’re in that phase at the moment.”
Mr Stanton said a key focus of the Synertrex platform in the mining industry will be on “predictive maintenance”. He said: “At the moment, if you have got a big slurry pump, you have a standard maintenance schedule that says every three months you break it open and you change the impeller.
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"Well sometimes that impeller is not yet worn out, so how do you tell by sensing, or by vibration or noise, that the impeller is still good? You can then defer the change out for a month or two. You can’t look inside a slurry pump – you have to be able to sense the vibration or temperature to tell you something.”
Equally, Mr Stanton added, the technology can signal if an impeller needs to be changed sooner if it has worn out and, as such, is operating less efficiently by using too much energy. While there is a cost in replacing the part, Mr Stanton said, it is more than offset by the savings in energy costs.
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