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Embedded condition monitoring of power transmission of a pellet mill

Country of Origin: Serbia
Reference Number: TORS20161013004
Publication Date: 13 October 2016

Summary

Serbian company developed a low-cost optimal micro configuration for measurement and condition monitoring of data collection system of pellet mills power transmission. Product is unique and represents new application of PIC (Programmable micro-controllers). Compared to other solutions, this system can be customized for individual customer request. The company is looking for manufacturing agreement.

Description

A Serbian company was established in 2010 by the experts in field of mechanical and electrical engineering. The experts are university professors with long-term experience in science who developed and applied a lot of technical solution in small and medium enterprises in region. The company´s products are different innovative devices for electronic measurements. 

The PIC (Programmable Interface Controller) micro-controller based system also has an integrated function with control application based on fuzzy logic. The system is based on PIC micro-controllers and represents the complete solution for condition monitoring regarding vibration, temperature and rpm measurement.

The goal of the predictive condition monitoring of planetary power transmissions in pellet mills is to indicate deterioration in the condition of the power transmissions before the actual failure occurs. In many cases, the defect does not cause an immediate interruption of the process. If this is the case, the defective part can be replaced or repaired during normal, scheduled maintenance periods, provided that the defect has been found in a sufficiently early stage. The most common causes of failure of rotary machines are faults in bearings, the stator and the rotor.
There are many methods for the predictive condition monitoring of rotary machines. The analysis can be based on different measured quantities. These include, for example, temperature, current, magnetic flux density and vibration. The basic design idea was to create a measurement and data collection system for condition monitoring in which the data analyses and decision making are based on fuzzy logic programming.

The data collection system for a pellet mill consists of several sensor units attached to data collecting units. There can be one or more collector units all having one or more sensor units connected. In order to keep the sensors inexpensive, they are based on a simple micro-controller with no external memory. Therefore, the collector units provide a temporary storage for the measurement data. If a particular measurement generates data, more than the internal RAM of the micro-controller can store, the data transmission between the sensor unit and the collector unit has to be in real time. However, the data transmission from the collector unit onward can be slower and can be packet based.

Current and Potential Domain of Application: Diagnosis regarding vibration, temperature and rpm measurement of any type of pellet mills power transmission. The company seeks manufacturing industrial company for potential manufacturing agreement.

Advantages and Innovations

The advantages of a multi channel collector unit realization include a simple communications protocol, because each transmission line has only one communicating pair, the collector unit and the sensor unit. Furthermore, the interface between the sensor unit and the transmission cable can be made fixed (i.e. on conectorless), thus making the connection both more reliable and less expensive. In the case of the bus based realization, the connections can be fixed too, but this makes it very difficult to modify an existing system. Moreover, in the case of the multi channel collector unit, the whole system is more reliable, since a defect in one spot of the cable cancels the connection between the collector unit and one sensor unit only, instead of, in the worst case, making all of the sensors unavailable to the collector unit.

The system architecture is distinctively minimalist. It is characterized by the following features:
• Separate code and data spaces
• A small number of fixed length instructions
• Most instructions are single cycle executions with single delay cycles upon branches and skips
• A single accumulator the use of which is implied
• All RAM locations function as registers of both source and/or destination of math and other functions.
• A hardware stack for storing return addresses
• A fairly small amount of addressable data space, extended through banking
• Data space mapped CPU, port, and peripheral registers
• The program counter is also mapped into the data space and writable

Stage Of Development

Available for demonstration

Requested partner

The preferred partners are industrial SMEs involved in the electronic industry, as well as manufacturers of electronic equipment. The Serbian company has developed an innovative product and it is looking for manufacturing agreement with potential partner.

Cooperation offer is closed for requests