Smart Factories

The combination of small, wireless battery-powered IIoT sensors with BARTEC’s high-end cloud management solutions makes it possible to predict failures and set up predictive maintenance plans for pipelines (to combat CUI) and distribution boards in hazardous areas. Doing this allows inspection and service intervals to be optimized and the number of person-hours for required inspections to be reduced – all while increasing safety and extending the usable life of the monitored equipment.

Thanks to high levels of flexibility and scalability, the IIoT enables a new, agile approach to digitalization in hazardous areas. The ATEX-compliant modules – including sensors, network technology, gateways, and edge computing components – can be easily retrofitted during business operations to allow additional data to be easily collected and evaluated, even in relatively complex and rigid systems. This enables the capture of important information that either did not previously exist or that could previously only be collected with exorbitant effort. This information can be used to make production processes economically transparent, even retrospectively, and used in combination with tailor-made algorithms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence to identify competition-relevant correlations. The resulting deeper or broader understanding of processes can, in turn, be used to further enhance safety, increase overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), ensure compliance monitoring, or to align production with market requirements to an even greater extent.

The oil, gas, chemical, and similar industries produce and transport huge quantities of valuable but dangerous goods worldwide. Companies today often lack the level of supply chain transparency to determine where their goods are (or where their capital is), and to identify potential transport disruptions or dangerous situations. Modern track and trace solutions help you keep an eye on your investments, even in hazardous areas. Quantity measuring systems for logistics, such as BARTEC‘s PETRO 3003 series, make the measuring, monitoring, and billing of hazardous liquids more efficient.

Digital monitoring for issues such as pipeline corrosion, is a source of tremendous potential for service companies – and, ultimately, for pipeline owners and operators. In order to carry out this monitoring, sensors are installed between the insulation and the pipeline. These sensors send the position / temperature and humidity to a gateway via Bluetooth. Here, the data is collected and sent to the control room or to an evaluation system in the cloud. Algorithms are then used to evaluate the corrosion by taking into account the ambient temperature and process. This facilitates better decision-making; enabling, for example, unnecessary maintenance work to be prevented or costly maintenance to be postponed without compromising safety.