Prevent Belt Downtime Today!
There are three main reasons a belt will be down:
- Failure with on-drive pulleys
- Failure of the belt clip or connection
- Idler failure
Historically, of those reasons only idler failure is unable to be automatically monitored without human intervention. However, with recent developments in sensing technology, a new fully automatic method of providing long lead failure warning on an idler-by-idler basis is now available to the market.
Hawk Measurement Systems’ (HAWK) Praetorian Fibre Optic Sensing System has been active in the sensing market for ten years in the Leak Detection and Perimeter Security applications, and in the last five years has been rolled out to include new applications such as Conveyor Health Monitoring.
In the Conveyor Health Monitoring application, a fibre optic is attached along both stringers utilising a mounting product called HAWK Fibre Casing (HFC), which secures the fibre to the inner vertical surface of the stringer and provides mechanical protection of the cable in a single low profile package.
Installation is relatively straightforward, requiring no special tools or skills on most conveyors. A wide range of belt types are suitable for monitoring including cable conveyors, trough conveyors, Garland conveyors and wire-frame conveyors.
HAWK provide several solutions for system integration, from cloud based packages, email and SMS alerts, Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), and can provide assistance and solutions for interfacing with existing command and control solutions such as SCADA or DCS.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q: How long does it take to install?
A: With good access and a properly sized team, installation is accomplished within a few days. Sites typically install these systems as part of three or six monthly shutdowns.
Q: How does the system communicate a fault is present?
A: The system utilises a Priority Level system similar to existing traffic light or colour code systems indicating severity from Priority 1: (Imminent failure highly likely) to Priority 4: (Low Level fault). This priority is given alongside frame number and belt side indication, i.e. “Priority 2 failure on frame 1145, northern side”.
Q: How does the system compare to a human operator undertaking a belt inspection?
A: Field experience has shown that a skilled operator is able to detect Priority 1 and 2 faults with a high probability of detection but is unable to reliably detect Priority 3 or 4 faults. The effect of this is that a failure detected by Praetorian is detected days or weeks ahead of any possible human detection.
Q: What kind of Return On Investment (ROI) time is expected with the Praetorian Conveyor Health Monitoring System?
A: This will vary depending on the specific hourly valuation of the asset being monitored, its size, specification, and configuration. As an example, a previous client had calculated their ROI on monitoring a major overland belt as being only nine days!
Take control of conveyor reliability.
Contact HAWK today to see how Praetorian Fibre Optic Sensing can deliver early, idler-by-idler failure detection and dramatically reduce unplanned downtime!