Global Fertilizer Producer Prevents Emergency Shutdowns with a Portable Vibration Monitoring Solution

The customer is one of the largest producers and exporters of agricultural fertilizers worldwide. The company has a production line with several high-power electric motors and rollers that are exposed to prolonged vibration. To prevent mechanical failures along the line and avoid costly production emergency shutdowns, the customer needed a vibration monitoring system to be installed.

Brimit created an IoT vibration monitoring solution that provided several key features.

The sensors for the system were installed on electric motors and belt rollers along the production line. This allowed the customer to monitor the following parameters in normal mode:

• Acceleration, amplitude, frequency, and phase
• The temperature of engine bearings
• Acoustic spectrum
• Power consumption

Brimit’s system enabled the customer to predict the abnormal operation of mechanical parts along the production line based on increases in vibration—which can help eliminate emergency shutdowns before they even occur.

Predictive maintenance of motors and rollers mitigates the risk of emergency production shutdowns. When the system detects that certain parameters reach their threshold values, it switches to emergency mode and can shut down the production line. This allows the customer’s maintenance staff to promptly investigate the condition of the machines and take the necessary action to avoid further accidents and downtime due to damage and costly repairs along the production line.

After measuring operating parameters along the production line, Brimit’s vibration monitoring system sends the data to the customer’s software system, where it is processed, analyzed, and visualized. Since our system supports the Modbus RTU, it works with other vendors’ software according to industry-standard protocols.

If a customer doesn’t have the proper software for working with the data, it can be saved to a local storage or cloud platform, where it can then be visualized and used to predict further trends with the help of machine learning.

Brimit offers a wireless system of MEMS sensors that can be easily mounted wherever you need them: on engines, conveyor belt support rollers, pumps, and more. This kind of versatility allows our solution to be used in a variety of different fields, including mining, fertilizer production, wood processing, engineering, and water treatment.

Brimit’s vibration monitoring system uses standardized APIs and supports multiple industrial and IoT communication protocols, such as Modbus RTU, Modbus TCP, and MQTT.

The benefits of Brimit’s solution include:

• Compactness—Our devices are smaller than their counterparts with IEPE sensors.
• Mobility and autonomy—The sensors can be battery-powered and detachable and provide 24/7 monitoring without any additional support.
• Cost-effectiveness—Our system costs less than solutions with IEPE sensors.
• No software vendor lock-in—Brimit’s solution can be integrated with your software system or used with a special cloud platform (which we will provide) for processing data.
• Flexibility—Thanks to built-in algorithms, the system can process raw data in different ways and transform it for delivery to a final system.