Covid guidelines limiting shipboard access have spurred the uptake of remote condition monitoring, helping owners diagnose potential equipment failures, maximise uptime and avoid costly repairs
Restrictions imposed during Covid-19 have accelerated the uptake of digitalisation, pushing remote maintenance of engine and equipment health into the maritime mainstream. But vessel operators have only just begun to realise the benefits offered by the use of digital tools, remote diagnostics and artificial intelligences to operations, efficiency and the bottom line.
These were among the key takeaways discussed by panellists at Riviera Maritime Media’s Remote maintenance – conditioning monitoring in Covid times webinar, held as part of Marine Propulsion Webinar Week on 27 July.
Kicking off the webinar, Gavin Coull, service sales manager for Swedish bearings and seals manufacturer SKF, said: “Digitalisation, declining global exposure and rising competitive intensity,” were key drivers during Covid. As a result of these drivers, Mr Coull said five key themes emerged that will shape the post-Covid recovery efforts in operations.
The first theme, he said, was that vessel operators can use digital tools and digitalisation of operations and maintenance to build “operational resilience and review asset strategy,” reassessing geographic footprints, realigning resources and building a more robust supply chain risk-management function.
The second is an acceleration of end-to-end digitalisation in the organisation to improve customer experience, raise productivity and increase flexibility.
The third is using digital tools to gain transparency to monitor capital and operational expense that impact the bottom line.
The fourth involves transforming the workforce. Mr Coull said digitalisation enables the re-scaling of workforces, and “accelerates the transition” of how crew is deployed, moving “from historical manual, repetitive tasks to focus their time and effort on more value-add tasks within a vessel and marine operations.” He said: “This is all playing into the Covid times, driving (towards) the workforce of the future.”
The fifth and final theme involves re-imagining operations for a competitive advantage, developing new products and services and customer-service models.
With new safety norms in place, Mr Coull said: “The ability to perform tasks remotely, digitally with less touch points, has many advantages.”
“Performing tasks remotely, digitally with less touch points, has many advantages”
Based on a poll taken during the webinar, most of the delegates attending agreed with Mr Coull. When asked, ‘How beneficial do you feel conditioning monitoring is?’ 79% of respondents said it had ‘definite benefits’ and another 3% went so far as to say it was the ‘best thing since sliced bread’. Others were not as enthused, with 9% voting for ‘it’s all hype’ and another 9% saying it ‘has some merit’.
In a second binary poll, ‘Do you currently employ condition-monitoring techniques?’ 66% of respondents said they employ some form of condition monitoring, with only 34% saying they do not.
To support vessel operators, SKF has developed a wide portfolio of digital tools that can enable remote maintenance to support marine operations. SKF has developed the Enlight Centre, a unified data hub for predictive maintenance that collects data from sensors and systems for analysis, displaying the information in a dashboard that can be accessed by a chief engineer, superintendent, fleet manager or even by a class surveyor or an SKF remote diagnostic expert.
“Continuous online monitoring is becoming more scalable and more valuable every day,” said Mr Coull. To support its customers, SKF has invested in artificial intelligence and digital technology to generate easily digestible insights on equipment health.
When applied to rotating equipment, Mr Coull said such advanced analytics and software can be used to turn “data into decisions and actionable insights” for crew on vessels.
One shipowner moving from traditional time-based maintenance to a predictive maintenance programme using SKF technology is Norway’s Solvang. It is investing in SKF’s Enlight ProCollect systems for nine of its 27 tankers.
By implementing SKF’s QuickCollect vibration sensors and ProCollect app, Solvang can monitor a range of onboard rotating equipment, identifying equipment failures before they happen, reducing unplanned downtime for repairs and improving the service life of equipment, and helping to optimise the management of spare parts. Suitable for ATEX Zone 1, Class 1, Div 1 hazardous environments, QuickCollect sensor collects data in real time that can be viewed in the app or uploaded to the cloud for further analysis.
Under a five-year contract, Solvang will access to SKF’s Enlight Centre to help analyse and interpret data from the sensors.
Offline and online condition monitoring
Joining Mr Coull on the panel was Tony Planamento, technical projects manager for US-based precision alignment and vibration analysis firm AME Solutions.
Prior to Covid, Mr Planamento said the traditional method of condition monitoring was to send a technician or analyst physically to a vessel to collect the data from equipment, spending a significant amount of time on board before travelling back to the office to conduct an analysis and report. This traditional approach was time consuming. Limitations on shipboard access imposed on contractors during Covid made such condition-monitoring practices difficult, if not impossible and costly. When allowed onboard, contractors might be faced with a 14-day quarantine period, said Mr Planamento, “the cost of which is typically passed on to the end user.”
“This forced the industry to start thinking outside of the box and come up with some creative solutions,” he said, which led to the strategy of “transfer the data, not the person.”
As a result, Florida-based AME Solutions now offers offline and online. In the case of offline condition monitoring, the crew collects the data and transports it for remote analysis.
He said the front end of offline condition monitoring involves a crew member that might already have been trained or is “knowledgeable on how to collect oil samples. And then someone like ourselves will be on the back end, building the databases, transferring it to the crew to upload to the device, and performing the background analysis and reporting.”
Offline is a permanent installation, involving wires, cables, wireless sensors, Bluetooth gateways, with a remote login and background support, explained Mr Planamento. This would involve permanently-mounted accelerometers wired into a processing unit, or wireless accelerometers that transmit to Bluetooth gateways and up into the cloud.
In his presentation, Mr Planamento detailed how such an online conditioning-monitoring system would work. Customised visualisation software was used to display a simulated ship with four decks, one of which was highlighted in red. “That means there’s a machine on that deck that is in alarm status. If you click on that deck, it takes you to a general arrangement plan.” In this particular application, based on the vessel operator’s preferences, each machine on that particular deck has an area of interest that links the colour of the status. On the back-end, technicians would be able to “log in, analyse the spectrum, data, and figure out what’s causing that alarm,” said Mr Planamento.
“We’ve got level-one data, which is what we refer to as ‘general overall vibration’. Typically, data gets trended over time. As those trend values rise, they will pierce what we call an ‘alarm threshold’. Once that alarm threshold is pierced you then trigger level-two data, which is the spectrum time waveform diesel diagnostics. And some of these systems are pretty sophisticated in that they can trigger work orders to go and investigate this data as well. And that can help you drill down to the root cause.”
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