Pump station reliability
Common challenges in a pump station
- Motor and pump set breakdowns have a significant impact on the company’s ability to deliver water to the consumers. In most cases, they come with a huge price tag, fees, production losses and the inability to deliver water to the consumers.
- A reactive approach means operating machines until they fail, compromising the ability to meet water demand. Lack of process information leads to poor equipment availability and poor water quality.
- Protection of people to face the challenge of maintaining facilities that never stop and require as much equipment availability as possible.
Pump station reliability
How to ensure process quality?
Successful refurbishment of pump stations contributes to the process quality. For example, energy efficiency can be achieved by replacing 1250 kW motors with a combination of 600 kW motors and state-of-the-art variable speed drives to ensure optimum use of electricity. However, such an investment is very expensive, and in order to achieve a fast return on investment, water companies need to implement the latest technologies to ensure the required quality. Process quality can only be achieved by controlling and monitoring various variables such as level, pressure, temperature and flow.
Protection of people and equipment
Condition monitoring can prevent catastrophic failure. Monitoring your equipment’s condition will allow you to stop the motor and pump set in the early stages of failure. With early detection, you can protect your assets from irreparable damage and prevent failures that could cause injuries. Monitoring bearing wear, unbalance, misalignment, cavitation and operating hours allows you to perform proactive maintenance rather than reactive maintenance.
How to maintain process availability?
A smart wiring solution called IO-Link allows you to take all the information to your shop floor (PLC) and top floor (SCADA, MES and ERP). IO-Link is your gateway to Industry 4.0 and provides the possibility of cloud-based solutions. The hardware and software components allow direct networking of all connected sensors and actuators with a local server via an Ethernet network. Using this connection, machine data, process parameters and diagnostic data can be directly read and processed by the IT.
