Drives & Controls June 2022

39 www.drivesncontrols.com June 2022 TALKING INDUSTRY n Tony Coghlan Managing Director, Turck Banner Tony Coghlan has been with Turck Banner for more than ten years and was appointed managing director earlier this year. He previously served as an avionics maintenance engineer in the Royal Australian Arm before joining Siemens in the UK in 2004, where he worked until 2007, including four years as spare parts coordinator for Siemens Automation and Drives. Sally Sillis Technology Centre Manager, Schaeffler UK Sally has been Schaeffler’s condition-based maintenance specialist for the past five years. She has more than 22 years' experience in engineering. She holds a BSc in mechanical engineering from Liverpool University. She has held various roles at Schaeffler including product support, sales and engineering manager, and services and MRO manager. Andy Pye Webinar Chair and Consulting Editor DFA Media Andy has edited many leading UK design and manufacturing titles over the past four decades. He is a graduate material engineer and spent five years in engineering consultancy before entering technical publishing in 1980. Aaron Blutstein Managing Editor, Plant & Works Engineering Aaron is managing editor of Drives & Controls’ sister magazine, Plant andWorks Engineering, as well as the Smart Futures Web portal. He is also director of the conference programme for the Drives & Controls Show and allied events. systems algorithms to give accurate machine information. This can be broken down into numerous things, down to component level. It might be just a simple trend. Our systems are open, which is important to integrate into systems that are moving towards machine learning and artificial intelligence.” “We need to know our machines and how to measure them really accurately,” said Keith Gallant from Reliability Maintenance Solutions (RMS). “We have a real passion for trying to understand the machines, and the modes of failure." Gallant explained that this involves looking at how a machine moves through its modes towards a failure. His company assesses how to identify these modes and what measuring technology is appropriate. He showed a video to illustrate how a low-frequency sensor can miss telltale signs in the time waveform than can be picked up at higher frequencies. In response to a question from the audience, Gallant explained the role of harmonics:“It's not common that the first harmonic will be the highest amplitude, it's usually the two, three or four order harmonics, where you to start to see the increase in amplitude, so if we're not measuring up that frequency range, we won’t understand the severity.” Back online On 10 May, Talking Industry returned to its online format with a session covering the same themes. Following an introduction by Aaron Blutstein, editor of Drives & Controls’ sister magazine, Plant and Works Engineering, the event featured two external speakers. Sally Sillis, manager of Schaeffler UK’s technology centre, emphasised the benefits of holistic monitoring – the importance of having a view of the entire plant – in helping maintenance teams to work easily and cost-effectively. Tony Coghlan, managing director of Turck Banner, covered condition monitoring and RFID tracking. It is often claimed that the UK lags behind in adopting digital methods in maintenance. Sillis challenged this assumption, describing the UK market as “very mature. We have a lot of specialists, and when I compare with my colleagues in other countries, I think we’re very far advanced. “Much of the expertise stems from the oil and gas industry,” she explained, “with specific expertise in condition- monitoring with vibration. But we do have old infrastructure in our plants in the UK. So quite often, when we’re consulting with customers, they'll say: ‘all of this is really interesting to us, but I’m too busy fixing things, I don't have time to be proactive!’ Maintenance 4.0 is easier to implement if you are building new factories from scratch, and there aren't that many of them in this country.” Coghlan agreed. “Customers are dipping their toe in the water a lot more now, especially following Covid. And now with raw material challenges, it’s even more important to gather this information. But a long way down the line is how machine-owners can use this data to be more proactive in identifying savings in quality and cost. But we are definitely on the journey. We’re quite good in the UK, where we’re not trying to be that reactive. We’re trying to be more proactive now.” Referring to legacy machinery, Coghlan described recent products called IoT enablers, that make it possible to create parallel digital network, which Turck Banner calls “digital shadowing”. Legacy machines, he said, “may feature old PLCs or memory issues and users may not have an engineer that install condition- based monitoring. We can come along and create a parallel network. This is an advantage for brownfield sites.” n The online panel discussion on maintenance can be viewed at https://drivesncontrols.news/cq4cdd A recording of the Maintenance 4.0 panel discussion at Talking Industry Live can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=2jO1iDq2ado Other sessions from the Talking Industry Live programme can also be viewed on YouTube. They include: Robotics & Advanced Automation https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QuN3YT6oMAA Adapting to the Smart Era https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CB5EYab45JE Fluid Power and Factories of the Future https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=wrTGClKCnc4 Talking Industry The Panel