Machine Condition Monitoring for a Caribbean Resort

A Caribbean resort has numerous buildings spread out across a scenic campus. One of the company's most important concerns is reliable air conditioning, as guests will be very upset if they are uncomfortable. Downtime is not an option. But if air conditioning equipment fails completely - a compressor, for example - the replacement has to be shipped in from another country at an inflated price. The resort realized that closely monitoring their equipment would enable preventative maintenance, and greatly extend the useful life of their air conditioning systems. But how do you monitor things like pumps and compressors when they have no network interface and they are scattered across a very wide area?

There are simple, measurable parameters that can be used to predict when a machine will need maintenance. Comparing like temperature vibration, and current use to historical readings will raise a red flag if the newer numbers exceed acceptable parameters. So a local system integrator installed the Wzzard Intelligent Sensing Platform from Advantech B+B SmartWorx. The Wzzard platform creates a complete connectivity stack between sensors at the network edge and applications at the network core or in the cloud. It uses two pieces of IoT technology to do so; wireless Intelligent Edge Nodes and Spectre Network Gateway. The Wzzard Intelligent Edge Nodes connect to new or pre-existing industry standard senors, read their data and wirelessly transmit it to the Spectre Network Gateway. Every node has routing capabilities, so they are able to form extremely reliable, highly scalable, self-sustaining wireless mesh networks. Individual nodes need not be within wireless range of the gateway, as they can route the data across fellow nodes until it reaches its destination. The Spectre Network Gateway then provides secure network connectivity via either wired Ethernet or cellular data connections, with automatic failover. Attaching industry standard sensors to the air conditioning equipment, and attaching those sensors to Wzzard nodes turned each piece of equipment into a node on a modern network.

• [Data Management - Real Time Data]
  Real-time access to data, such as machine condition data, through a remote dashboard.
• [Process Optimization - Predictive Maintenance]
  Data analytics not only detects failures, it predicts failures. Correspondingly, alert levels are set to provide real-time text messages or email notifications of thresholds exceeded.
• [Efficiency Improvement - Production Uptime]
  Diminished downtime and related costs.