Sensor Use Cases in the Context of Industry 4.0

The need for monitoring of processes and equipment has been identified as a major driver for digitalization in process industries. With an ageing workforce and plant infrastructure, process plants need a means of ensuring the performance of their facilities in order to remain competitive. One approach is through more widespread and effective process and equipment monitoring to detect anomalies or identify opportunities for plant efficiency improvements. Monitoring tasks in process automation are classified as noncritical measurements that have no immediate impact on the business. Being non-critical, slow to develop and with a deferred impact, measurements for monitoring are often hard to justify. In many instances, such measurements are taken manually in a scheduled manner. Following this approach, operators have to live with the trade-off between manpower costs and the effectiveness and coverage of the checks. This approach, therefore, cannot be scaled up without dramatic cost increases. Indeed, the advent of a technology that is competitive with manpower costs would be the enabler for the more widespread use of monitoring technologies. In this paper, we present an approach to analyze cost-benefit structures that can be used to help guide the development of sensing solutions for monitoring applications. The approach is applied to the widespread and relevant example of pump aggregate monitoring. As a result, cost targets for sensor developments are identified. Relevance and some peculiarities of the use of low-cost sensing (LCS) elements are briefly discussed, as well as trends of recent product developments.

I. Introduction

Sensors are critical to the smooth and efficient functioning of process facilities. The importance of the information they deliver is determined by the application in which they are used. These applications can be broadly classified into three main categories: Safety, Control and Monitoring.