Use Case – Idletechs

Furnace monitoring

An industrial metal furnace is a large investment and part of a high-value production process. Even small improvements in the furnace operation can yield high economic benefits and large environmental savings. But how do you accurately monitor, track, and react to what happens inside the furnace?

Our Furnace Monitoring solutions combines high quality infrared imaging and existing process measurements with advanced analytics to give real-time data and process insights that can be used by operators for process control.

Anode quality monitoring

In general, 2-8% of all produced anodes have some form of defect that can lead to losses in terms of scrapping the anode or that the anode fails and disturbs the aluminium production process. These losses are in the range of 50 to 1000 EUR depending on the severity of the defect and where in the process it is discovered. For a paste plant that produces 500.000 anodes per year, this can amount to 1 to 10 million EUR per year.

Idletechs offers the Anode quality monitoring (AQM) solution, for anode paste plants. AQM provides continuous quality assessment of each anode, improved monitoring of critical process parameters and understanding of how different process parameters influence product quality.

Thermal condition monitoring

Equipment such as pumps, engines, compressors, and pipelines have distinct heat signatures that depend on the operating conditions, the environment, and the equipment wear. Understanding how these heat signatures change over time can be crucial for early detection and tracking of faults, allowing for more optimized maintenance planning, and improved HSE.

Idletechs’ Thermal condition monitoring (TCM) is designed to monitor and track fixed-equipment over time. The solution builds historical models of the expected equipment behaviour using thermal video and available measurements. Several layers of smart-analysis is then used to detect and analyse any changes to the equipment over time.

Real-time metallurgy models

Do you fully exploit your costly furnace simulators, or other types of heavy metallurgy models, or did they get left behind after the initial construction phase? And how can you really adapt the simulators for real-time use, and make sure they fit the observed (measured) reality in the plant?

Read about how we use metamodelling for Speeding up metallurgy models for real-time use.