In the packaging industry, sudden equipment failures are like "invisible mines" on the production line, which can delay order delivery or even cause chain shutdowns. The traditional operation and maintenance model relies on manual inspections and post-maintenance, but the Ply-Pack engineering and technical team has proposed a subversive idea: Let the machine learn to "self-check and self-heal".
Pain points force technological revolution
In 2021, when we transformed the production line for a dairy company in South America, we found that its packaging machines shut down 2.3 times a month on average due to problems such as overheated bearings and cutter wear, and each maintenance took at least 4 hours. What’s more difficult is that 75% of the failures occurred during the unattended night shift. “Engineers are either repairing equipment or on the way to repair.” The customer’s production manager said helplessly.
This case exposed the common problem in the industry - the high cost of passive operation and maintenance. The Ply-Pack R&D team focused on two major directions:
. Fault prediction accuracy: How to predict part failure hours or even days in advance?
. Diagnosis result operability: How to make early warning information reach decision makers directly instead of being drowned in the ocean of data?
Vibration sensor + AI algorithm: equip the equipment with a “stethoscope”
Traditional temperature and pressure monitoring can only capture “occurred” abnormalities, while Ply-Pack’s intelligent diagnosis system chooses to start from vibration spectrum analysis.
Technical core analysis:
·Deploy high-sensitivity MEMS vibration sensors at key equipment nodes (such as spindles and gearboxes) to collect three-dimensional vibration waveforms at a frequency of 5,000 times per second;
·Strip off environmental noise through wavelet transform algorithms to extract characteristic frequencies that are strongly correlated with bearing wear, shaft misalignment, etc.;
·Combining historical maintenance data with machine learning models to establish a "vibration feature-fault type-remaining life" relationship map.
"The smartest part of this system is 'learning and evolution'," explained Ply-Pack's chief sensor engineer. "For example, when the vibration amplitude of a certain type of bearing is in the range of 1.2-1.5m/s² for 6 hours, the system will automatically mark it as 'need to be replaced within 72 hours', and this threshold will be dynamically adjusted as the equipment accumulates operating time."
From data to action: closed-loop transformation of the operation and maintenance chain
In 2023, this system was verified in actual combat in TasteFresh, a Southeast Asian food company:
·Hierarchical warning: The system divides risks into three levels: "observation (blue)", "warning (yellow)" and "emergency (red)", and pushes them to the mobile app and the workshop dashboard through the IoT platform;
·Smart decision-making: When the red alarm is triggered, the system automatically retrieves the maintenance manual, inventory spare parts status, and recommends the nearest service engineer;
·Knowledge precipitation: Each maintenance record is associated with the vibration data and stored to form a company-specific "fault database".
The results are exciting: the customer's annual unexpected downtime has been reduced from 328 hours to 27 hours, and the spare parts procurement cost has been reduced by 41%. "Now when we receive a yellow warning, it's like receiving a weather forecast. We can just arrange weekend maintenance." TasteFresh equipment manager commented.
Industry Inspiration: The Value of Reconstructing the Operation and Maintenance Model
The significance of the Ply-Pack intelligent diagnosis system is far more than a technological breakthrough, but also lies in the redefinition of the operation and maintenance logic of packaging machines:
· From "repair when broken" to "maintenance on demand", reducing over-maintenance by more than 35%;
· From "experience-driven" to "data-driven", novice engineers can also accurately locate faults;
· From "single point response" to "global optimization", providing factories with a panoramic view of equipment health.
As we often say to customers: "Zero downtime is not a goal, but a natural result of intelligent operation and maintenance." In the future, Ply-Pack will continue to deepen the management of the entire life cycle of equipment, allowing more companies to experience the production freedom of "no-sense operation and maintenance".
