Enging develops advanced online real-time asset monitoring solutions, being the first non-invasive pioneering technology in the market, that allows an extremely precocious and accurate online fault detection.

Exclusively acquiring the electrical variables and using a deterministic mathematical algorithm, Enging’s solutions allow to analyze the degradation evolution and detect very incipient faults in the operating conditions of the electric machines, without any kind of sensor inside of the assets and without the need for any historical data. Our solutions can provide actionable insights immediately, enabling clients to schedule maintenance rather than having failures interrupting critical production processes.

The maintenance of critical equipment will continue to be carried out in a very reactive and time-based manner. The more traditional monitoring systems available on the market still complex and expensive, hindering its scalability and the real transition for a condition-based maintenance approach.

Enging presents a new technology to monitor electric machines and to make their fault diagnosis with a new predictive maintenance technique based only in electric variables, voltage and electric current.

Electric machines are powerful and reliable, but sometimes, due to its operating conditions, age and grid power quality problems, these machines fail, causing serious financial costs and quality of service issues to the electrical utilities. Traditional fault diagnosis methods require the machine to be turned off or they are very expensive. Most of them are invasive.

The solution proposed by Enging represents a step forward in the state-of-the-art of predictive maintenance techniques. Diagnosis methods in the Enging solution only require the data acquisition of the electric variables, to provide a clear and precise indication of the condition status of the electric machine as well detect incipient faults, in a non-invasive, simple and economical way.

Enging has a diagnostic technique that presents a good level of precision and reliability, which gives us advantage in diagnostic situations less achieved by other techniques. At the same time, this solution is perfectly complementary to the other market solutions, which together can help monitor the asset at a lower cost than the actual techniques.

With the large-scale installation of the Enging’ solution, the probability of occurrence of undetectable catastrophic failures is significantly reduced, leading to important cost savings, in the order of millions of euros, with traditional maintenance techniques and unplanned downtime, which normally have enormous financial impacts. Also, the knowledge at every instant of the asset condition and the degradation trends in assets that are in service well beyond the initial expected operating time when they were designed and manufactured, will allow a better planning for the need of investments in new costly assets.

The potential of this innovative monitoring technique has been demonstrated as well as its simplicity and scalability. The system will provide improved information that effectively increases asset performance and supports daily decision making.

Increase the reliability and efficiency of the monitored assets, increasing the company’s productivity and reducing its costs by avoiding unplanned stoppages and/or events. As consequence, companies implementing Enging´s solutions will benefit by offering a better customer service while achieving cost reductions, obtaining a less risk of people exposure, getting access to a low carbon tech, increasing maintenance efficiency and overall productivity.

This monitoring solution is very versatile and can be applied to virtually all type of industrial sector where we have electric machines, since a transformer, a motor, a generator, an inverter, etc... As a result, all industrial sectors related to production, transmission and distribution of electricity can benefit of this monitoring solution. Moreover, this solution can be extended to heavy industries such as big plants in the cement, chemical, paper, water and mining sectors or in a Wind turbine and PV Solar farms.

“In Europe, offshore wind has been there for a number of years, but I think in the United States we're a little bit behind that,” said Karustis.

Should it be successful, Halo’s approach could lead to a surge in US onshore wind, which has historically lagged behind other regions in terms of wind installation and production. Since 2016, according to the International Energy Agency, the US has installed just 22.6GW of new onshore wind capacity, compared to 30.7GW in the EU, and 50.3GW in China, struggles that Karustis hopes to address.

Last December, the Chinese Government approved a number of new offshore wind projects, totalling 13GW of production and costing around $13.3bn, as the country continues to invest in utility-scale power. Karustis hopes projects like Halo’s distributed turbine can contribute to a more balanced wind sector in the US, with both large- and small-scale operations expanding renewable power.

“The large-scale wind turbines wouldn't be phased out, it's kind of an ‘all of the above’ thing,” he said. “The large wind farms play a very important role for us in reducing the carbon footprint globally, and hopefully the micro wind market is going to augment that by producing energy where energy is being used. It's a good two-pronged approach.”

This two-pronged approach also includes other renewable power sources, including solar and utility-scale wind; Halo is not trying to replace all clean energy with its turbines, but offer another option for people eager to engage in renewable power, who may have been historically sidelined due to the high costs of building utility-scale facilities or the unsuitable geographical characteristics of the places they live.

“When you look at that market we're very excited because just as megawatt-scale wind is a large market, I think distributed wind can be as big of a market or bigger over time,” said Karustis.

“When you have incentives and improvements in the technology, the costs go down, so you can be more competitive and compete, and that's certainly the case with megawatt-scale wind,” he continued. “Just 15/20 years ago, it wasn't competitive with natural gas [and] coal, but it is now. So those government policies have helped and they've driven the technology improvements, so it's all bundled together.”

Enging – Make Solutions, SA

E geral@enging.pt
W www.enging.pt

company insight / sponsored by Enging