Energy efficiency has become a critical aspect of modern facility management, driven by a combination of rising energy costs, environmental concerns, and government regulations. The cost of energy has steadily increased over the years, making it more important than ever to minimize energy waste in facilities. Additionally, with a growing focus on sustainability and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, energy efficiency has become a top priority for organizations.
In facilities, rotating equipment like motors, pumps, and fans typically consume the most energy. By optimizing the energy use of these machines, facilities can significantly reduce energy waste and improve efficiency. This not only lowers energy consumption and carbon emissions, but also increases the reliability and durability of these vital parts.
The efficiency of production processes has a big impact on energy use. By optimizing energy use in these processes, facilities can improve efficiency and reduce costs, leading to increased competitiveness in the market. Many facilities are implementing strategies such as energy-efficient lighting, HVAC systems, and building controls to minimize energy waste and improve efficiency.
Governments around the world have also introduced regulations to promote energy efficiency, further increasing its importance in facilities. These regulations often require facilities to meet specific energy-use targets, making it essential for organizations to monitor and improve energy efficiency to comply with these regulations.
The Role of Predictive Maintenance
Predictive maintenance is a proactive method of maintaining rotating equipment that may considerably improve a facility’s energy efficiency. By monitoring the performance of rotating equipment, predictive maintenance helps organizations identify and prevent issues that may be wasting energy, such as misaligned equipment or equipment that is operating outside of its optimal operating range. By correcting these issues, predictive maintenance can improve the overall efficiency.
Predictive maintenance minimizes unplanned downtime, which is a common cause of energy waste in facilities. By identifying potential failures before they occur, predictive maintenance minimizes unplanned downtime and improves the overall availability of rotating equipment. This not only helps to reduce energy waste, but it can also help improve the reliability and longevity of these critical components, further contributing to increased energy efficiency.
In addition to reducing energy waste, predictive maintenance also helps to reduce energy costs for facilities by improving the efficiency of rotating equipment. By using predictive maintenance techniques, facilities can take a proactive approach to maintaining rotating machinery, reducing energy waste, and increasing energy efficiency, all while contributing to a more sustainable future.
Contribution of Energy Monitoring
Energy efficiency and energy monitoring go along with one another. The process of measuring, following, and assessing energy use in a facility is referred to as energy monitoring. On the other hand, energy efficiency refers to minimizing energy waste and optimizing energy utilization within a facility.
Energy monitoring offers a thorough insight of how much energy is utilized in a facility, which may be used to spot inefficient and wasteful energy use. Energy monitoring may give a thorough picture of energy use and assist facilities in finding possibilities to increase energy efficiency by evaluating energy use in real-time.
Energy monitoring is applicable to many different forms of rotating machinery, including motors, pumps, compressors, and other kinds of mechanical machinery. Facilities can identify spots where energy is being wasted, such as equipment that is misaligned, overloaded, or running outside of its ideal range, by monitoring the energy consumption of these components.
Additionally, by keeping an eye on the energy usage of rotating equipment, facilities can see opportunities to enhance the performance of these parts, such as slowing down pumps outside of peak usage times or realigning motors to use less energy. By using energy saving techniques, facilities can increase the energy efficiency of all rotating equipment and minimize energy waste. According to the techniques used, chronic problems can be prevented by determining which equipment or process originates from the energy waste.
To illustrate the impact of energy monitoring on maintenance costs with an example, compressed air leaks are an important source of wasted energy in air systems in industry. 25-30% of the compressed air at the compressor outlet is wasted due to leaks on the line. In a well-maintained system, the percentage lost due to leakage should be less than 10%.
The operating cost of an air compressor is more than the initial purchase. Industrial air compressors consume a lot of energy. When they are not working as efficiently as they should, some of this energy use does not contribute to the operation of the facility. If 170 m3/h of air is needed and the leakage level stays at 30%, 220 m3/h of air must be produced to compensate.
For reference, an air compressor consumes an average of 20 kW of energy per 170 m3/h. Therefore, producing 50 m3/h more to compensate for the air loss increases the energy cost by about 30%. The Compressed Air and Gas Institute (CAGI) estimates that a 6mm leak could cost you $2,500 to $8,000 per year. While the increase in energy consumption in the compressors can be monitored by energy monitoring, on the other hand, it allows root-cause analysis to be made on the side of whether the increase in energy consumption from the current and voltage signals used in energy monitoring is due to gas leakage in the line or a fault on the machine.
Promoting Sustainability
Sustainability may be greatly aided by energy monitoring in the industrial sector, especially for rotating machinery. Energy monitoring offers useful information on energy use, which may be used to execute energy-saving measures that both directly and indirectly lower carbon emissions related to energy production.
Energy monitoring can also encourage the industrial sector to embrace green technology. Facilities can evaluate the effectiveness of various energy-saving measures and decide which technologies to install to further increase energy efficiency by monitoring energy use over time. This can involve implementing energy-saving technology, such as energy recovery systems.
By offering data-driven insights into energy use, energy monitoring of rotating equipment in the industrial sector may assist facilities in achieving their sustainability goals. Facilities may effectively promote sustainability by reducing carbon emissions, financial and environmental costs of energy by putting energy-saving measures into place and utilizing green technology.
Application of Energy Monitoring
Sensemore performs energy monitoring applications by calculating the power consumed by motors driving rotating equipment. For power calculations, current and voltage information from the phase cables feeding the motor is taken through analog sensors. Since the collected analog data includes the phase difference information between voltage and current, the power factor is also calculated. The collected data is transferred to the cloud with the analog data collection device Duck, and power and energy consumptions are calculated. Data collected and calculated on the cloud application is displayed. Point-based and total energy consumptions are displayed and inefficient points on the line are detected as well as the anomalies resulting in irregular current and voltages in the input cables of the motors with their root causes.