Highland Spring Group is the largest producer of naturally sourced bottled water in the UK. They operate with highly critical assets throughout their manufacturing plants, including blow moulders, rinsers, fillers and labellers. If one of these assets goes down, production comes to a halt. Therefore, it is key that the health and condition of these assets is continuously monitored and maintained to the highest standard, to ensure that assets run to their optimum and unexpected shutdowns are prevented.
Highland Spring Group selected AVT Reliability® to assist them with their condition monitoring (CM) journey on line 4 at the Blackford site in Perthshire, Scotland. The line produces a total 119,000 plastic bottles of water per hour, in sizes ranging from 0.5 to 1.5 litres.
It wanted AVT Reliability® to help increase plant reliability and protecting these critical assets.
The project aims were to:
Increase productivity
Extend machinery lifespan
Optimise the periodic maintenance programme
Reduce machinery maintenance expenditures
Product selection
AVT Reliability® have products and services to suit different scenarios. Following a site survey, its engineers advised that the best suited CM technique to increase plant reliability was to carry out vibration analysis using Machine Sentry® Online (MSO-1), on the line’s main drive motor and gearbox, as well as the rinser, filler and capper carousels.
MSO-1 is ideal for vibration monitoring on continuously running, highly critical assets. The data being recorded is trended in real time, which allows remedial works to be carried out during a planned outage. Readings are automatically uploaded to the cloud-based platform, Machine Sentry®, and secured to ISO27001, one of the most widely recognised international standards for industrial supply chain security. As the platform is cloud based, engineers are able to analyse and report on data within minutes, not days, wherever they are in the world. All asset health and analytics are completed in the system, meaning all data remains in one location.
MSO-1 in action
In January this year, the MSO-1 system at Highland Springs Group generated an email alert which identified increasing vibration levels on the outfeed start wheelbearing. This email alert allowed engineers to take action and investigate as soon as possible before the situation got out of hand. Following analysis from expert engineers at AVT Reliability® and discussion with the client, the conclusion was reached that the vibration increase was due to a possible bearing issue. Bearings had not been replaced since 2003. As the fault was found early, further damage to the asset was prevented. If the fault had gone undetected, there could have been catastrophic damage, resulting in a more expensive repair and extended plant downtime.
Benefits
MSO-1 allowed engineers to analyse the data collect and predict when a failure was going to happen. The engineers at Highland Spring Group were then able to plan scheduled downtime and complete the planned work scope within three days, saving 48 hours of repair time, amounting to a total of £16,800. When the cost of the Machine Sentry® system is removed, the actual saving is £10,300 after this one incident alone. The production line has operated without problem since.
Following the work completed by AVT Reliability®, David Simpson, Site Engineering Manager at Highland Spring Group said: “To assist our goal in achieving a world class engineering department, the biggest area to improve was to reduce reactive maintenance and supply our operation customers a reliable preventive maintenance schedule, ensuring machine up time is increased to meet our growing marketplace demand.
“AVT Reliability® came onsite and presented the products they could supply to help us achieve this. Machine Sentry® Online was chosen and installed with almost no disruption to our production line.
“The benefits are huge, with the early warning reports identifying potential issues and reporting recommended actions, which we add to our weekly maintenance plan and rectify. Machine Sentry® Online will be my option as we roll this excellent analysis tool out to other production lines.”
For more information visit:
www.avtreliability.com
