Davies Wear Plate Systems Australia has developed a unique wear plate system that includes an option for remote real-time monitoring of wear inside bins, chutes, and similar inaccessible sites, without having to shut down, or otherwise expose the wear surface. ICON Technologies worked with Davies Wear Plate Systems to develop a smart rugged data logging system to suit their patented wear sensors.
The data logging system is based on National Instruments’ Compact FieldPoint PAC hardware. A single plant-wide system can contain any number of Compact FieldPoint nodes, with each node monitoring up to 64 unique wear sensing bolts. Data are returned directly as mm wear, or % wear, and can be retrieved manually, via OPC, or directly to a networked database as required.
The system offers the following benefits to any industry in which the management of mechanical wear is critical:
- Accurate prediction of “end-of-life” for installed wear plates, so that replacement can be scheduled in planned maintenance periods
- Detection of accelerated wear conditions that could lead to catastrophic failure and unscheduled shutdown
- Detection of unusual wear patterns, that could indicate change in upstream conditions
NI Compact FieldPoint, LabVIEW RT
