The Coors Brewery in Burton-on-Trent has been a pilot customer for the installation of 4B’s HotBus Digital Hazard Monitoring System.
In the brewing industry stakes are high, since it is a high volume business where downtimes can be very expensive.
In the case of the Coors Brewery, the processing of a batch of 300 tons of grain, running down from the top of the malting plant to the bottom, takes 3 days. The cost of a batch being lost can amount to about £50K according to Plant Engineer Roger Wright.
At the same time, production equipment is exposed to very tough operating conditions:
Blowing hot air at a temperature of up to 80ºC through the drying rooms reduces the lifetime of the equipment and fan bearings, which if left to run in a hot condition, lose their lubricating medium.
Preventative maintenance can help reduce the risk of equipment failure and downtimes.
By constantly monitoring the bearing temperature, it is possible to anticipate the point at which the bearing is going to stop working effectively.
Preventative maintenance is what the 4B HotBus Hazard Monitoring System is all about.
A serial network for continuous bearing temperature and remote sensor monitoring, the 4B HotBus digital monitoring system allows the different sensors in a plant to be connected into one network and to be displayed in real time on one output unit.
The system is extremely user-friendly. It comes with user adjustable alarm and shutdown trip points, an easy-to-use logging and trending software and it gives the user the facility to enter his own sensor names.
Before Coors Brewery started to use the 4B HotBus System, the company’s hazard monitoring system was a patchwork of homemade stand-alone equipment that was linked to an output moni-tor.
The problem with such small, isolated equipment is threefold: it is more expensive; it becomes ob-solete in a short period of time and it cannot be monitored in a very effective way.
At Coors Brewery, the 4B HotBus System has brought massive improvement.
“The 4B HotBus Systems finally allows us to comply with ATEX requirements”, Plant Engineer Roger Wright points out. Another key benefit for him is the fact that the 4B HotBus system“ pro-vides alarm outputs to shut down the plant as well as providing valuable maintenance information”.
The 4B HotBus monitoring system has recently become even user-friendlier through the introduc-tion of a graphical plant monitoring software, called “BusView”. With “BusView” users of the 4B HotBus network can display their plant data in a more meaningful way, using photographic data or plant schematics. Plant data can be captured into an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis, and e-mails can be triggered for certain plant data or alarm conditions.
At Coors, plans are to make the 4B HotBus system the standard hazard monitoring system for the other plants within the group at Burton-on-Trent. ■
Integrated Digital Hazard Monitoring
The Coors Brewery in Burton-on-Trent has been a pilot customer for the installation of 4B’s HotBus Digital Hazard Monitoring System.
In the brewing industry stakes are high, since it is a high volume business where downtimes can be very expensive.
In the case of the Coors Brewery, the processing of a batch of 300 tons of grain, running down from the top of the malting plant to the bottom, takes 3 days. The cost of a batch being lost can amount to about £50K according to Plant Engineer Roger Wright.
At the same time, production equipment is exposed to very tough operating conditions:
Blowing hot air at a temperature of up to 80ºC through the drying rooms reduces the lifetime of the equipment and fan bearings, which if left to run in a hot condition, lose their lubricating medium.
Preventative maintenance can help reduce the risk of equipment failure and downtimes.
By constantly monitoring the bearing temperature, it is possible to anticipate the point at which the bearing is going to stop working effectively.
Preventative maintenance is what the 4B HotBus Hazard Monitoring System is all about.
A serial network for continuous bearing temperature and remote sensor monitoring, the 4B HotBus digital monitoring system allows the different sensors in a plant to be connected into one network and to be displayed in real time on one output unit.
The system is extremely user-friendly. It comes with user adjustable alarm and shutdown trip points, an easy-to-use logging and trending software and it gives the user the facility to enter his own sensor names.
Before Coors Brewery started to use the 4B HotBus System, the company’s hazard monitoring system was a patchwork of homemade stand-alone equipment that was linked to an output moni-tor.
The problem with such small, isolated equipment is threefold: it is more expensive; it becomes ob-solete in a short period of time and it cannot be monitored in a very effective way.
At Coors Brewery, the 4B HotBus System has brought massive improvement.
“The 4B HotBus Systems finally allows us to comply with ATEX requirements”, Plant Engineer Roger Wright points out. Another key benefit for him is the fact that the 4B HotBus system“ pro-vides alarm outputs to shut down the plant as well as providing valuable maintenance information”.
The 4B HotBus monitoring system has recently become even user-friendlier through the introduc-tion of a graphical plant monitoring software, called “BusView”. With “BusView” users of the 4B HotBus network can display their plant data in a more meaningful way, using photographic data or plant schematics. Plant data can be captured into an Excel spreadsheet for further analysis, and e-mails can be triggered for certain plant data or alarm conditions.
At Coors, plans are to make the 4B HotBus system the standard hazard monitoring system for the other plants within the group at Burton-on-Trent. ■