ELE Times: What is technology tools applied to Predictive Maintenance?
Daniel Lai: To achieve predictive maintenance, distinct sensors and performance monitoring tool are used inside a computer or in operating system to find out system performance. The issue with these two tools is that they cannot work by themselves and operator cannot continuously monitor system performance so a unique tool is required. The tool required should proactively monitor system performance but there is absence of such tool in market. MOXA presents a ready to use tool called proactive monitoring and it’s free to download from our website for customer to achieve predictive maintenance. We have allowed customers to set the criterion, which will generate alert. After alert generation the new information will overwrite the older. When storage is reached 80% an alert to the operator is sent, during this time also system is in good operating condition which provides enough time to schedule their maintenance.
ELE Times: What are the challenges Maintenance engineers have while implementing Predictive Maintenance approach?
Daniel Lai: The challenges lies as there is no ready to use tool in market right now so if customer relied to have predictive maintenance in their computer, they have to invest the engineer and resource for developing and customize this tool. But the tool is readily available with MOXA.
ELE Times: What type of investment is required for utilizing this maintenance approach
Daniel Lai: Moxa’s embedded computer is native support of Moxa’s proactive self-maintenance function to help customer, achieve predictive maintenance on computer and also the application running on DA series computer. The only effort to you or investment is just to buy MOXA embedded computer.
ELE Times: With reference to the paper presented by you on Predictive Maintenance on Smart Grid, highlight the key points of presentation?
Daniel Lai: The key point of my presentation is involvement of intelligent devices with substation automation. Those intelligent devices connected to communicate and control directly by computer. The paper has showed Computer as critical equipment for sub-station, it has also introduced good maintenance strategy and to select right computer for increasing reliability.