KNOWLEDGE BASE Throughout manufacturing and engineering industries, aging infrastructure is struggling to meet the demands of round-the-clock operations, predictive maintenance and data-driven decision-making. Shortcomings include legacy automation hardware, lack of connectivity and systems lacking real-time monitoring. To quantify the digitisation movement, more than 65% of industrial companies are prioritising control system upgrades as part of their modernisation strategies, 28 HYDRAULICS & PNEUMATICS June 2025 www.hpmag.co.uk Unplanned downtime is one danger that keeps industrial production managers up at night. With good reason, given that a 2022 Siemens report put the annual cost of unplanned downtime for a typical large industrial plant at $129 million. Owen Crew, electrical engineer at synchronous motor excitation specialist Excitation & Engineering Services (EES), draws on an ongoing project to explain why engineering facility managers are embracing investment in digitising their systems. Why industrial facilities are going digital to tackle unplanned downtime according to Deloitte’s 2023 Industrial Digital Transformation report. In this context, legacy excitation systems, long valued as the backbone of industrial control, are becoming increasingly unsustainable and obsolete. Their lack of integrated control, absence of diagnostic feedback and growing obsolescence make them liabilities in applications that demand precision and uptime. Engineering professionals managing large synchronous motors therefore find themselves with the clock ticking. Continuing with aging analogue equipment means higher operational risk and reactive maintenance, and upgrades are eventually inevitable. Digitising now promises data oversight, reliable operation and better lifecycle insights. An analogue excitation system in need of upgrades In summer 2025, EES will commission a new, digital excitation system at a major European gas compression facility. While commissioning must be done swiftly to minimise downtime, the project has involved more than six months of negotiation, design, specification, manufacturing and testing. Prior to engaging EES, the facility relied on a series of analogue relays housed in the switchgear cubicles to safely start the large synchronous motor that drove the gas compression. Installed in the late 1990s, this starting and excitation process had no advanced control elements and had become unreliable over time. Failures of speed sensors, circuit breakers and safety mechanisms became gradually more common. The system’s analogue nature meant that there was no oversight into these faults, so maintenance technicians would undergo time-consuming investigations to identify and remedy the problem. The company asked EES to help it transition to digital start sequence control and excitation in a bid to understand more about its equipment’s performance, system health and future maintenance requirements. The design process involved several days onsite performing a survey, as EES’ engineers must fit the new system into the same space and modify existing wiring. Devising the modifications required to move the switchgear controls to the new system was the biggest engineering challenge in this project, as
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