Modbus and Energy Monitoring Part 2


The Client briefing (this article is a real briefing from Muroplas)
Part 1 |  Part2
The Real Challenge has Arrived
Nowadays, businesses need to focus in increasing their economic profitability, not only by raising their profit margins but mainly by reducing costs.
To kickstart this cost reduction process, it is fundamental that objective measurement occurs (in this case a measurement of energy consumption), as without it we cannot begin to plan a reduction due to not knowing how much is being consumed.
Energy is one of the main annual expeditures for a business, and as such a maintenance manager needs to gather real-time data of the consumption in order to apply new mothodologies and innovation that reflects in actual savings for the business.
And thus the first question to pose is:
How to monitor energy, and which equipments are available in the market?
Knowing that energy monitoring is something that has been common practice for quite some time, we contacted with several suppliers in Industry events (such as Schneider, ABB, Omron Rockwell, Advantech, …). However, we reached the conclusion that each made this data available by proprietary software, which not only entailed annual or monthly costs but also did not allow for full integration with already existing business softwares.
Muroplas integrates ABB equipments with Coreflux The brand that offered better guarantees and communication openness, for Muroplas, was ABB. Each data aggregation unit would allow the integration of up to 64 simultaneous machines, with the possibility of scaling through additional units in case further machines were required.
At this point, a second question was raised:
What kind of information and data do these supplier’s softwares include, and are they 100% adjusted to the real needs of the company?
In reality, the takeaway was that roughly 80% of the information did not match the real needs of the businesses.
Having been challenged with monitoring all the different units of a plastic engineering plant with elevated production for nacional and international clients, an accurate answer to all these questions became highly relevant.
Additionally, there was the need to integrate the devices with the data pipeline that is used in the rest of the facilities. In this case, as Coreflux was already being used, all we needed was to identify the communication protocol that the energy measurement devices used and resort to the respective Flux Asset, in this case Modbus.
Muroplas integrates ABB equipments with Coreflux At this point we had thus secured energy monitoring devices and a data pipeline, all that was missing was the creation of a new dashboard. In collaboration with Setlevel , a 100% customized solution was developed, which not only showed the real-time energy monitoring data relative to the main equipments, but...

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