Emerson Dust Collector Monitoring and Control Solution

Shawn Tierney meets up with Eugenio Silva of Emerson to learn all about Dust Collection Systems, and Emerson’s Monitoring and Control Solution in this episode of The Automation Podcast.

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Shawn Tierney (host): Welcome back to the automation podcast. My name is Shawn from Insights, and I wanna thank you for tuning back in. Now in this episode, I had the pleasure of meeting up with Eugene Silva from Emerson to learn all about the industrial control and monitoring system that comes with their industrial dust collectors. Now I thought it was very interesting. I hope you do as well.

But before we jump into this episode, I do wanna thank our members who made the video edition possible. So So when a vendor does a sponsor of the episode, the video becomes a member only perk, and that is just $5 a month to get started. So thank you members for making the video edition possible. With that, I also wanna thank our sponsor for this week’s show, the automationschool.com and the automationblog.com. I have an update later in the show what’s going on on both sites, and I hope you’ll, stick around and listen to that, towards the end of the show.

But with that said, let’s go ahead and jump into this week’s episode of the automation podcast. It is my pleasure to welcome Emerson back on the show and Eugene on the show to talk about dust collector monitoring. You guys can see the slide if you’re watching dust collector monitoring and control solutions. I’m excited about this because this is a solution versus, like, a discrete product. So with that said, Eugene, would you please introduce yourself to our audience?

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): Yes. Shawn, thank you very much for this opportunity. Hello, everyone. Here’s Eugenio Silva. I’m a product manager, intelligence automation within Emerson, the discrete automation part of Emerson.

I’m glad today gonna share some, some of our understanding and learnings with the dust collector monitoring control solution. And, when I talk about that, Emerson is also involved in in others, types of solutions that, our purpose is to drive innovation that makes the world healthier, safer, smart, and more sustainable. And I’m also responsible for continuous emission monitoring, pest collectors is one, utility, energy and compressed air management solutions. So for today, I prepared something that, we go a little bit, into why this type of, test collector solution is important, from understand of our customers and industry point of view. We’re going to look into the fundamentals of a dust collection, from the particle sensors to the dust collector systems, and then dive in into the dust collector solution where I’m going to provide you, some features, also explanation why they are there, and how this kind of capabilities deliver value to our end users and customers, and, hopefully, to have time as well to have a short, recorded demo that, brings us, full scope how the operators look into into that solution when they they use it.

Shawn Tierney (host): But before we jump in, I wanna thank the automationschool.com for sponsoring this episode of the show. That’s where you’ll find all of my online courses on Allen Bradley and Siemens PLCs and HMIs. So if you know anybody who needs to get up to speed on those products, please mention the automationschool.com to them. And now let’s jump back into the show.

Eugenio Silva (Emerson): In terms of key applications, industries use cases, dust collector is essential for many industries that produce dust, produce any kind of a pounder, any kind of a fume, and typically air pollution control, boundary processing, handling, industrial dust, fume ventilation are covered by one or another way by dust collectors. And, the industries that I put in both, these are the the dirty ones in the sense that they produce a lot of, particle, either in terms of gases or dust. Therefore, the regulations that are in these industries are quite strong. So cement, metals, chemical plus, carbon, black and toner, like lithium battery assembly, disassembly, metal foundry. And what is interesting is the either you produce a waste that you have to manage it properly, can be also recycled, for example, in the industries like plastics in food or wood.

All the collected dust that you have, you can also reuse and sometimes recycle. But why? Why this is important? Why is it important to extract dust from these industries? Let’s start on the right side because this is what the the customer is looking for.

Because the cost of our pollution, the hazards, this this safe safety accidents that can be caused by this kind of harmful airborne and particles and forms are so substantial, then of course, it’s very much regulated in all these industries. And if you calculate the costs on the public health, Sometimes big accidents in plants where even big fires or hazards to people operating the plant. We talk about billions per year, the cost of that. And one of the consequences of having such issues is that when the dust extraction system is not working properly or you have really a downtime. For example, I’m going to explain that this really depends on components that are very, they use so often that they wear down, like filters, like post files.

And each time that we have a downtime is not the cost of the dust collector downtime that’s important. It’s the overall downtime costs that imposes to the operation of the plant because in order to be conformist, they have to stop operating until they fix the issue. And these downtimes, of course, arise in many ways in different aspects. How complex is this dust collector. But I’m I’m going to give you, some insights that, if a dust collector system does not have any solution to monitoring real time or control, the efficiency.

Basically, the personnel is managing these assets without any sight, and everything can go wrong. That’s why the TCO and the maintenance aspects are quite important. Because if you’re not aware where is the problem, when you have to plan and this becomes a firefighting or reactive mode, then your costs are going to be quite high. And when you talk about the TCO, it’s about the cost of the equipment, the acquisition, the cost of operation, meaning not only the personnel, but in this case, we use a lot of compressed air. I’m going to explain why.

The maintenance costs, as we explained, and the disposal costs. Disposal means, the filter bags that must be replaced and and changed, but also the the dust, the fume, all the elements that must be, properly managed and recycling sometimes. So this is the aspects why it’s important. Now let’s turn us about, the benefits and savings. So if you use the dust collector solutions, of any kind that can monitor in real time all the aspects, of the operation of a dust collector system and, also contributes turning maintenance from reactive to preventative and maybe predictive, then the best thing that you can do is to avoid huge penalties.

As you can see on this graph, every decade, let’s say, the fines are getting steeper. And the reason for that is because of the the damage and the result of a big, like, say, issue on the plant regarding to this dust part is is quite heavy. So, therefore, we talk about 100 k’s or even plus in some industries like primary metal and chemical, where one single incident, it’s about a 100 k in average or more. And then, of course, to avoid that and to be completely compliance, you have to operate that systems, in many cases, 24 by seven. And, therefore, any way possible to reduce downtime and, as a plus, reduce the energy costs because for compressed air, you have to use electricity, then, it pays off because you’re going to be full time compliant.

And the other thing is if you do properly, monitor and control your dust collector system, you also increase the filtration efficiency. So that means you are far from the high levels, where after that threshold, you would be penalized. You can operate under, conformist, under compliance, but can also expand the equipment life. For example, the life bags, the post valves, you don’t have it to replace as often, which is the case if you don’t do any real time monitoring diagnostics. On the left side, the way that we talk about improving maintenance is the total cost.

When we talk about the filter life, at least one unit of a filter, It’s about 18 k, US dollars. And you see that, the tip of a iceberg is just the purchase price. The dust collector system, like, of course, has an acquisition cost. But below that, as a total cost of ownership, you have the energy that you expand utilizing the systems. You have the filter bags.

You have to keep parts in your inventory. You have to dispose of that. And, of course, you have the downtime costs and also the labors labor c