Having your home heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems inspected occasionally is a good example of preventive maintenance – and important to keeping them running properly. But what if you could predict that the heater will go out in exactly two months – during the dead of winter?
With the right information, you could plan accordingly, replace the unit, and avert the need for emergency repairs and other inconveniences that come along with them.
“Often we only find out that something is faulty when it stops working,” said Dave Smith, MSP430™ microcontroller (MCU) product marketing engineer. “In some situations, we use preventive maintenance on a fixed schedule to try to avoid these unforeseen failures.
“Predictive maintenance goes a step further by adding a level of intelligence into the equation.”
That’s exactly what we are doing at TI: adding a level of performance to our MCUs to help enable applications like predictive maintenance. (Read a white paper about predictive maintenance.)
Imagine: If this type of predictive maintenance could help you avoid a mini-emergency at home, what could it do for a factory full of electronics and equipment?
New TI devices
We have several new devices that present intriguing possibilities for factories. For example, the SimpleLink™ dual-band CC1350 wireless MCU and the low-power, high-performance MSP430FR5994 FRAM (ferroelectric random access memory) MCUare designed for end applications such as ultrasonic metering, portable health devices, and building and factory automation equipment.
The FRAM MCU has up to 40 times the performance of similar MCUs on the market and could be used to analyze vibrations for predictive maintenance in factories, Dave said.
Also, we just announced our latest high-performance, 80-volt current sense amplifier, the INA240, which can detect shifts in operating current levels in factory equipment. This can help diagnose the overall health of the equipment and indicate potential failures before they happen.
“Its ability to work in a tough switching environment and provide the most accurate measurement on the market is amazing,” said Jason Cole, a product line manager. “Designers who have to deal with these types of applications truly understand the value of accurate, low-drift precision measurements.”
We unveiled the INA240 today at Electronica.
So what exactly is predictive maintenance? Essentially, it’s when connected machines can tell you they're going to fail before they fail. It can help companies save millions of dollars by predicting failures and reducing unplanned down time. This helps keep end equipment customers happy.
Replacing traditional preventive maintenance with innovative predictive maintenance will not only reduce factory down time, but it will also improve safety and reliability in factories and save money on parts and labor.
“Rather than experiencing a failure, an engineer can be sent out to replace the faulty component sooner,” Dave said.
He cited an industrial motor or pump as an example.
“Even the smoothest motors give off small vibrations. By measuring and looking for changes in these vibrations, we can determine whether the motor is running well or if some unseen wear is occurring,” he said.
Predictive maintenance is here today and can be easily integrated with current factory communication systems. It can be designed into new production processes or retrofitted into existing processes.
Introducing the low-energy accelerator (LEA)
Our new 16-bit MSP430 MCU is the first device to include a low-energy accelerator (LEA) – an accelerator that is highly optimized for ultra-low power, signal processing applications. This new peripheral extends the reach of the MSP430 MCU’s processing ability within certain applications.
The LEA module’s signal processing capabilities will also help designers develop more compact and simpler embedded systems that are needed to analyze vibrations in factory equipment.
“Today these systems are expensive, complex and power hungry. Our device can help reduce the system cost and complexity to enable more predictive maintenance systems to be implemented,” Dave said.
Today’s systems are typically limited to expensive industrial installations. In the future, we will have predictive maintenance in our home HVAC systems so we can reduce system failures.
Our device could also have a positive environmental impact: By reducing power, we are essentially extending battery life, which in turn reduces the number of batteries that are being disposed of. This is difficult to quantify, however, as it depends on the application and how much the LEA module is used, Dave said.
“For many battery-powered applications where there is a limited amount of energy available, this device with the LEA module can provide a much more energy-efficient solution,” he said.
Learn more about SimpleLink CC1350.