Dries Van Loon, Vice President – Products, Nanoprecise Sci Corp, talks about the transformative impact of their advanced solutions on the cement industry.

Provide an overview of your company’s current initiatives and strategies to enhance energy efficiency in cement production. How does Nanoprecise’s predictive maintenance technology specifically benefit the cement industry, and what makes it unique compared to other industries?
Nanoprecise’s predictive maintenance technology offers key benefits for the cement industry by providing real-time monitoring of equipment, predicting faults before they occur, and optimising maintenance schedules. This helps reduce unplanned downtime, lower energy consumption, and cut greenhouse gas emissions. What sets Nanoprecise apart is its focus on the unique needs of cement manufacturing, where equipment operates under harsh conditions and efficiency is crucial.
By integrating AI and IoT, Nanoprecise delivers precise insights into machinery performance, enhancing operational efficiency and environmental sustainability. Our technology pinpoints excess energy use and high emissions in processes and equipment. By tackling these inefficiencies, Nanoprecise’s predictive maintenance solutions directly cut energy consumption and GHG emissions while enhancing operation efficiency. For example, if a motor’s energy use rises due to faults, the system alerts the team to
resolve the issue, reducing both wasted energy and associated emissions.

Can you elaborate on the importance of your IP68-certified IoT hardware in ensuring reliable data collection in the dusty environments of cement plants?
Conditions in the cement industry are some of the harshest among industries; most critical equipment and its instrumentation are exposed to natural elements as well as high heat, humidity and dust. Accurately certified hardware ensures reliability and repeatability of the data collected and transmitted to ensure timely insights. Instead of constantly addressing instrumentation issues, the hardware will reliably inform you about the status of critical equipment, allowing for timely and effective maintenance decisions and enhancing your productivity.

How does your customised AI-based health analytics platform cater to the specific needs and challenges of cement manufacturing plants?
Rotating equipment is the most critical in the cement-making process. Issues with slow-speed kilns, dryers, high-speed gearboxes of conveyors and critical fans can shut down the process for extended periods, causing big financial losses.
Partnering with Nanoprecise can eliminate this unplanned downtime. Our platform additionally tracks changes in energy consumption, directly linking inefficiencies and emerging mechanical or electrical issues to lost kilowatt-hours (kWh) and associated costs. This enables you to prioritise maintenance actions that will significantly impact energy savings and cost reduction.

How does your 6-in-1 wireless IoT sensor enhance the ability of cement manufacturers to monitor equipment health remotely, particularly in confined or challenging spaces?
Our wireless IoT sensors, with their easy installation, magnet mount and compact size, significantly reduce the cost of an implementation project (the gateway hardware installation and IT project typically take more than 1/2 of the initial installation project cost) but also reduce the time to scale as any IT project and gateway installation across an industrial environment takes time to prepare and execute. Due to the direct cellular connectivity from each sensor, there is no need for vendor-proprietary gateways and networks to be deployed for the sensors to communicate. If cellular connectivity in a plant is limited, the customer’s WiFi network can also be used for our sensors to connect to directly. Often, this is already available and can be a shared resource for multiple IoT and modernisation projects.

Can you explain how your AI algorithms predict the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of critical components and the impact of these predictions on maintenance planning and operational efficiency?
The true value of any predictive maintenance programme is a combination of three types of outputs.

• Accurate change detection: This helps to understand any change is present on the equipment and how it impacts normal operating conditions.
• Root cause identification: A maintenance action can only be defined based on an accurate root cause. So, any detected changes should
  be linked to an actionable root cause, allowing proper preparation and execution of the maintenance task.
• Remaining useful life: This allows maintenance planners to understand the severity of a developing issue and ensure the maintenance task can be planned in a timeline with minimal impact on operations without increased risk of lost production.

Many PdM systems provide the first output by flagging general changes. However, this needs to be actionable data for the maintenance and operations team as it would require more in-depth investigation. The value for any PdM Solution is created only if the correct maintenance action is planned based on the insights created from the data. Here is where Nanoprecise has been relentlessly focused in the past years to be a true value adder for our current and future customers. Additionally, we are the only predictive maintenance solution on the market that combines predictive maintenance and energy consumption due to any process inefficiencies or developing faults. This feature allows for linking maintenance and process issues to measurable impact on energy consumption, ensuring a plant can run as efficiently as possible.

What specific solutions does Nanoprecise offer to combat the adverse effects of dust on machinery in cement plants, ensuring optimal performance and longevity?
Our solution of IP68 hardware has been specifically designed for the harsh requirements of a cement plant. Our sensors are fully enclosed while in operation and can work autonomously for 3-5 years. This design ensures that the focus is on the reliability of the equipment, not on the IoT hardware, giving you confidence in the performance of our product.

How does your technology handle the challenges of monitoring diverse and intricate machinery, such as kilns, mills, crushers and conveyors, in cement plants?
To monitor the wide variety of applications specific to the cement industry, from slow speed to high speed, our sensors can be configured to ensure proper data is collected for each type of application. For slow-speed applications, our total collection time can be extended to ensure a sufficient number of shaft revolutions are captured, which is the only way to identify the root causes of issues.
Additionally, our unique combination of Triax Vibration, Ultrasound, Temperature and Flux
into the same sensor hardware allows for a full picture of the machine health and identify developing
faults in an early stage regardless of application or operating speed.

In what ways does predictive maintenance help in mitigating the environmental impact of cement manufacturing, particularly in terms of reducing carbon emissions?
When predictive maintenance is an integral part of a company’s maintenance practices it will increase equipment efficiency and directly impact the total energy consumed for the same output for any equipment.
With the Nanoprecise solution fully integrated, our end users not only receive actionable insights with defined ‘remaining useful life’, but also continuous data on the impact to energy consumption and its effect on carbon emissions. This is crucial in prioritising maintenance tasks not purely based on potential saved downtime and repair cost, but also on the highest energy impact, ensuring that maintenance tasks have a significant, measurable contribution to reducing carbon emissions.

What future trends do you foresee in the realm of IT initiatives for the cement industry, and how is Nanoprecise preparing to address these trends?
With cybersecurity being at the top of every IT department’s concern, implementing any outside solution will require compliance with ever more strict IT requirements. At Nanoprecise, we have ensured our system is designed from the ground up with stringent security requirements, from data encryption and secure data transfer to cyber security for our cloud environment. By adopting direct cellular and WiFi communication protocols, we do not need to be integrated inside the customer’s IT environment, making implementation easier as end-to-end data security is entirely handled by our solution.
Additionally, we are proud to be the first and one of the few IIoT solutions that have been SOC 2 Type 2 compliant for multiple years. This assures our entire company and infrastructure is compliant with the most stringent security requirements and continuously adapted to new cyber security threats, as it’s a rapidly developing risk that needs continuous adoption.