Page 34 - Plastics News December 2017

FEATURES
FEATURES

power system. According to the Electric Power Research major components such motors, heating units, pumps and
Institute, power quality problems cost U.S. manufacturers more. With the optional ComponentAnalyser, the system
up to $188 billion a year—$9.6 billion in the plastics can even keep tabs on mechanical components such
industry alone—with 80 percent of those problems created bearings, gearboxes and valves. Combined, the system
by manufacturers’ own internal power systems. Bad can predict impending machine and component failures
power is wrecking motors, transformers, electronics and to prevent unscheduled downtime, and send alarms via
other components way before their times. It’s causing text or email when significant problems are detected.
lost production and product quality issues. And it’s How Does Power Analyzer Work?
unnecessarily driving energy bills up higher and higher.
It starts with a simple toroid sensor that is clipped
What can you do about it? For most plastics processors, around the power lines of all significant electrical
there hasn’t been a practical or affordable way to stay machine components. The sensors are hardwired to a
on top of their plant power issues. But that has changed data hub that wirelessly connects to a plant floor router.
with the advent of MachineSense Power Analyzer, a power The powe consumption data is then sent to the cloud-
monitoring and analysis system that can help identify and based Crystalball software for analysis. The software
diagnose power issues that heretofore required expensive automatically translates complicated electrical graphs
diagnostic equipment and expert technicians. This new into the intuitive dashboards available on desktop or
monitoring technology is easy to install, requires little handheld devices. Power Analyzer can even provide a
technical expertise to operate and is much less expensive full cost analysis of your power consumption. Plug in the
than you’d expect. You can spend just $1,200-$1,300 on electricity rates from your utility company, and you can
a monitoring system that can pay for itself in the first see your consumption in real dollars as well as kilowatts.
year on power savings alone.
Now you can visualize power cost, not just on a per-hour
Continuous 24/7 Monitoring basis, but also per unit of production.

Historically, plastics processors had little choice but to Because it is a diagnostic tool, the one thing Power
bring in outside electrical consultants with the knowledge Analyzer doesn't do is recommend solutions to specific
and instrumentation to diagnose plant power problems. problems. To handle that aspect of fixing power problems,
Since that’s an expensive proposition, it’s often a course MachineSense has assembled a partner network of service
of last resort, and it still may not ferret out problems companies with expertise in power quality solutions. Using
that are transitory in nature. With MachineSense Power Power Analyzer as the ‘MRI’, these service providers can
Analyzer, the diagnostics are performed continuously, fix load issues or install devices to protect your equipment
and the analysis comes back in a form you don’t need such as surge protectors, additional capacitors and so on.
an electrical engineer to understand. The
system’s simple dashboard conveys critical
information at a glance, and offers plain
English explanations for likely causes of non-
conforming conditions. That, of course, helps
identify immediate problems. But the system’s
Crystalball software also provides a means to
discover recurring problems that don’t present
themselves over a short period of time. For
example, in one case it helped a stretch-film
processor identify a recurring power drop
problem that only happened at night.

The software also creates a baseline profile to
which equipment can be compared over time.
This data can be used to monitor the health of

Plastics News December 2017 34