Unigel is one of Brazil´s largest petrochemical companies and has increasingly built solid and long-lasting relations with leading industries, such as WEG in order to keep focusing on technology and innovation.

WEG Motor Scan®: much more efficiency for industrial processes

Aiming to boost its results and definitively match its industrial park with Industry 4.0 integrated technologies, the company installed in 2019, in its Camaçari hub, in Bahia, a total of 46 WEG Motor Scan® sensors and four Gateways, with further installation of about 130 sensors in all its manufacturing units.

Focused on monitoring rotating equipment in critical applications, the installations will be done in several systems driven by electric motors, such as compressors, centrifugal pumps, tower fans, boiler water pumps, extruders and chillers.

How does this for Industry 4.0 solution work at Unigel?

The installed solution consists of allowing interaction of the sensors, application, routers and portal, providing remote real time monitoring, offering up-to-dated and faster operations through the Internet of Things (IoT).

At Unigel, the system sends an alert to the control room operator, coordinators and unit supervisors about the status of the factory equipment, without the need for on-site measurement and checking. On the maintenance side, the system provides information on the monitored equipment condition, which helps to improve the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). Based on the data captured and sent to the cloud, it is possible to make faster and more assertive decisions, allowing the implementation of predictive maintenance, significantly reducing the number of unexpected production stops, resulting in higher efficiency and extended machine lifetime.

Which are the benefits of Industry 4.0 for the petrochemical segment?

The biggest advantage for Unigel is that the technical team responsible for maintenance and equipment reliability has machines diagnosis in the right time, allowing the possibility to establish new maintenance strategies for each piece of equipment and avoid plant shutdowns. In addition, there is the prevention of breakdowns and reduction of in the intervention time from the maintenance team on the machinery, as the sensor not only indicates where the problems that need to be solved are located, but also signals other failures that were not noticed. This is what happened inside Unigel Cyanide blowers, which had a blower with an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 27 days and, even when applying the best maintenance practices, the MTBF has not changed.

The operation of this equipment consists of pulling air through a cyclone and sending it to a washing tower. After installing the WEG Motor Scan®, it was possible to identify in real time that every 4 days the equipment vibrated for about 30 minutes above the critical limit and this happened at different times during continuous operation (24 hours). Afterwards, the vibration reduced to acceptable levels for the maintenance team, who, upon checking the equipment in the repair shop, found out that a layer of dust was left on the rotor blades causing an intermittent vibration for 30 minutes. Once the problem was found out, a cleaning routine was implemented when the alert with the first indication of vibration was sent. The equipment has been operating for 6 months without any failure. “After monitoring, a cleaning routine for the blowers was implemented, making small stops and washing the equipment internally. With the implementation of this action, we have eliminated the breakage of this equipment and, consequently, the shutdown of the unit for at least 60 hours”, said Mário Rodrigues Bonfim, Unigel´s Maintenance Coordinator.

In addition to increasing its productivity and efficiency, the company investments also resulted on an expected savings of about R$ 60,00 to R$ 120,00 thousand per year.

Recognized as market leader for solutions in different applications, WEG offers to the market several combinations of high performance products for Industry 4.0 with the objective of improving industrial processes to all market sector customers.

For additional information on WEG Motor Scan® and on WEG Digital Solutions, please visit: www.weg.net/digitalsolutions