Soft drinks manufacturer, Britvic avoided six hours of unplanned downtime and the loss of 288,000 bottles of soft drink after a condition-monitoring system detected an impending pump problem at its Rugby production plant, the company said.
The warning allowed engineers to remove and repair the pump during a planned production stop. The repair took 45 minutes, compared with the six hours of unplanned downtime that engineers estimate would otherwise have resulted from the failure.
“Just this one notification paid for our entire investment in the condition monitoring solution and the first year of our Analytics subscription,” said Chris Heslop, Engineering Specialist at Britvic’s Rugby facility.
Britvic installed condition-monitoring hardware from Swedish industrial engineering company Alfa Laval on 107 LKH centrifugal pumps at the site. The Rugby plant operates around the clock and uses hundreds of pumps across production lines making a range of soft drinks.
The site’s maintenance team said it wanted earlier warning of developing faults because it operates a wide variety of pump types and cannot hold spare parts for every configuration. A failure can bring a production line to a halt for several hours.
The monitoring system uses sensors to measure pump vibration and transmit the data to gateways, which then send it to Alfa Laval’s Analytics platform. Operators receive notifications when the system identifies irregularities.
Within a few months of installation, the system flagged a potential problem with a pump impeller that, according to Alfa Laval, would otherwise have gone unnoticed until a failure occurred.
The maintenance team was able to inspect the pump and carry out the repair during planned downtime. The 45-minute intervention avoided the estimated six-hour production interruption and the associated loss of 288,000 bottles.
The intervention also reduced the knock-on impact of a pump failure. Alfa Laval says Britvic avoided four hours of additional cleaning-in-place (CIP), saving 2,000 litres of water as well as the energy and chemicals associated with the cleaning process.
Britvic said it is now considering extending condition monitoring to additional pumps at the Rugby facility.
