Client Profile.
The client is an Asian food manufacturing company that specializes in cleaning, sorting, and packaging of raw pulses. From processing to final packaging of various pulses, they rely on heavy-duty machines like bucket elevator, blower, de-stoner, and dryer.
Business Need.
The pulses manufacturing plant was permitted a daily power consumption of 265 kVA maximum demand. Overshooting this limit would invite hefty monthly penalties from the local power distribution company. Due to analog meters and limited visibility of actual power consumption across plants, the company unintentionally breached this limit and paid heavy fines each month.
Additionally, erratic power consumption patterns raised safety concerns for the main feeder. To assess plant and unit level power consumption data, the company relied on manual reports. Needless to say, these bulky reports were difficult to comprehend, tedious and erroneous.
The company hence partnered with Hitech to deploy an intelligent energy monitoring system to track and maintain power-consumption across machines, reduce human intervention and bring down penalty costs.
Challenges.
- Use of traditional machines and analog meters limited access to historical power consumption data and other relevant data points
- The multiple data sources were disjointed or haphazard and failed to give a unified version of consumption patterns
- Inefficient metering and data collection methods to track energy consumption
Solution.
Deployed the Hitech Energy Monitoring System (EMS) which included installation of smart sensors and IIoT devices to track power consumption across the plant. The solution provided:
- End-to-end visibility of all energy related parameters across all the sections
- Instant alerts and notifications on breach of pre-defined threshold value
- Intuitive daily and monthly power consumption reports, along with prediction of approx. electricity bill amount.
Approach.
Assessment and Documentation of As-Is Conditions:
- The Hitech team visited the plant and conducted detailed discussions to identify the exact pain-areas for the raw pulses manufacturing company.
- Identified that the current energy meter didn’t have a communication protocol.
- Defined a list of critical energy KPIs consisting of kWH, Power Factor, Maximum Demand, Voltage, Current etc.
- Conducted a survey to establish OT network.
- Studied the last six months electricity bills to identify the power consumption patterns across the entire unit.
- Identified a standardized format for monthly energy monitoring reports.
Custom EMS Deployment:
- Installed new digital energy meters on plant feeder, Current Transformer (CT) on busbar and IIoT gateway in main control room of the plant.
- Connected all the devices through a single OT network to continuously monitor, map and optimize energy consumption in real-time.
- Created a web-based intuitive dashboard for real-time visibility of power consumption data to all relevant stakeholders and generation of monthly reports based on various KPIs.
- Send instant alerts and notifications through web application, SMS and emails to respective users for different KPI parameters.
- The EMS helped to:
- Collect all energy parameter data in near real-time
- Analyze and interpret meter data to estimate monthly bills and penalties
- Set energy benchmarks, enhance energy accounting, operational and maintenance activities for main incomer and plant feeders
- Build energy saving best practices
- Gain 100% visibility across the plant’s energy patterns
- Our system provided data-based insights to the client to evaluate their energy-related activities and take timely decisions for any changes required.
Tools and Technology Used:
- AWS, IIoT platform, IIoT gateway, and PostgreSQL
