DSS180: What's Coming Up In Smart Dust Collection Systems with Joe Haney

In today’s episode of the Dust Safety Science podcast, Joe Haney, Product Line Leader at Industrial Accessories Company – IAC based in Mission, Kansas, discusses the concept of smart dust collection systems, including the Smart Plant Remote Monitoring System that IAC offers. He answers the following questions:

What is the Smart Plant Remote Monitoring System?
What failure points can the Smart Plant Remote Monitoring System detect?
What should we look for in a smart dust collection system?

What is the Smart Plant Remote Monitoring System?

Joe explained that the principles of how baghouses and dust collectors should work have not changed for decades. The type of systems can change and the method of filtration can change slightly but those are few and far in between.

With Smart Plant, the intelligence and data acquisition and connected nature of large multi-compartment baghouses or even what they ventilate can help with design and drying equipment.

Critical bag houses already exist in the form of a plant PLC or central control system. For Smart Plant, there are just a lot of baghouses up on a silo (for example) or somewhere remote in a fuel yard. These areas require very small dust collector systems that are not connected to a central control system.

“The Smart Plant System is taking the control system for a local baghouse and getting into that IOT or Internet of Things Industrial Revolution 4.0 for connected dust collectors,” Joe says. “If you have a bin vent dust collector on top of a silo collecting cement dust, it has to be physically checked to get a status update. Smart Plant delivers those measurables to a central portal – something that you can view on the Internet or smartphone.”

Smart Plant goes beyond what’s merely visible and tracks variables like temperature, humidity, motion, vibration- all things that a lot of plants and personnel are concerned about but may not have the ability to measure or the funds to hardwire in traditional plant PLC systems to those baghouses to get those measurables.

“The Smart Plant is a nice way to get you that data, get you that visibility – but hopefully do it in a way that’s cost-effective but also something that’s actionable for the folks that are going to use the system,” Joe says.

He gave an example of a situation where it delivers value to a plant.

“Let’s consider differential pressure as an example. Our customers tend to want to attack their most problematic baghouses first with this technology. So they have a baghouse, it has a control board. It’s cleaning, it’s functioning, but it’s something that they get a lot of maintenance work orders cut for. So that’s typically one that we go after first. There’s a chance that when we put that in and differential pressure across a dust collector is a problem they’re trying to attack, you’re going to know pretty quickly that it is running at a high differential pressure frequently.

“We can augment the system and the notifications to say, ‘Okay, let’s notify a limited number of people when it hits a certain pressure point so they’re aware and can maybe take action. We don’t want to give them fatigue from this type of system. We want the notifications to lead to intelligence. Something after 3 months, 6months, a year of being installed, we’ve been able to start looking at that data and analyzing it and determining if and when you need to be notified.”

Joe said that one customer was repeatedly having high differential pressure issues on a baghouse, and they weren’t sure as to why. All they knew is that personnel were regularly having to get inside the baghouse because the filters were crushed. They had to change them out, put in new ones, button up the baghouse, and get back up and running.

“Once we had a controller on there that was connected to the internet, sending data, giving them visibility they didn’t have otherwise, they realized that it had to do with their fuel mix for this specific application coming from multiple sources. ‌One provider delivered dirty fuel through this baghouse system, which caused the pressure readings to shoot up a lot faster than usual.

“Once we had that visibility, we were able to prepare. We knew that the fuel delivery was coming. We would be able to either augment the baghouse cleaning system or lower the drafts as far as we could within the baghouse system while maintaining the carrying velocity we needed in the ductwork. Just a few steps to go through to eliminate these terminal failures of the filter. There just wasn’t a way to do it until we had that connected visibility of the baghouse we got through the Smart Plant system.”

Differential pressure or certain readings on the baghouse are the same type of thing as that you might experience during a doctor’s visit. Looking at blood pressure or listening to your chest with the stethoscope, the differential pressure gives you that same snapshot of how that baghouse is working. Instead of having to go and get those readings manually, you get a visual map of that same performance parameter delivered right to your computer.

What Failure Points Can the Smart Plant Remote Monitoring System Detect?

Smart Plant examines failure points like temperature, moisture, vibration, and humidity. When asked what other points it could detect, Joe mentioned static pressure.

“Most recently, we’ve made a lot of inroads by looking at a smarter way to wirelessly track static pressure,” he says. “Specifically, I’m talking about pulse jet dust collectors and the fact that any pulse jet dust collector requires compressed air pressure to clean the filters. If you can’t clean the filters, pressure will continue to climb, and it will lead to a terminal failure of that baghouse. That may be something that you only traditionally can see in one of two physical ways: actually seeing it or being near that equipment and hearing the hissing of a failed diaphragm valve or the fact that a diaphragm valve does not fire. So if we can track static pressure, the chances are that it will eliminate a lot of failure modes for that baghouse.”

He stated that other installations are currently monitoring vibration on a fan or fan motor.

“Depending on the horsepower of a given fan on a baghouse system, if you exceed a certain vibration level, you should not expect that motor to last on that fan. So if we can add that to the suite of the install, you’re going to be running a lot smarter.

“We had one recently where we tied in a level detector in the hopper of a baghouse. The limit switch was telling them that the rotary airlock was no longer functioning. In this instance, I’m thinking that something got into the airlock that jammed it up. They had to get in there, clean it out, and pull that thing out. Well, if we can tie in the limit switch on that airlock to something to send a message right to your smartphone, you’re going to know before that situation gets out of hand.”

Other conditions that Smart Plant may be expanded to detect include:

Incoming temperature to a baghouse
Humidity- by controlling humidity levels, the filters can last longer

What’s amazing with that Smart Plant system is what I’m saying to you, Chris is the same stuff that I said 20 years ago. The advice is the same, but now we can, with that baghouse, point to a graph and say, “Look, I’m not blowing smoke here. Look at the difference. You can watch the cleaning cycles just drop by 80, 90% in this example because they’re not required to maintain that pressure.” And it’s really cool to show that to somebody and say, “Look, this is what can get you through another campaign at your plant.

Conclusion

At the end of the interview, Joe suggested that the system monitoring that Smart Plant offers may be able to play a role in preventing combustible dust conditions.

“Thermal conditions, whether it’s a fire or an explosion, happen multiple times throughout the U.S. Some of them are systems that aren’t related to dust collectors. But there’s got to be indicators on a lot of those thermal conditions leading up to that upset condition. So if that’s something you can have more early awareness of, then everybody wins there. It is possible that someone could have an explosive condition and not be aware of it for hours, if not days. So even something as simple as tying in that relay output from a burst sensor is going to give you immediate notification that you’ve had that type of condition occur.”

If you would like to discuss further, leave your thoughts in the comments section below. You can also reach Joe Haney directly:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-haney-7051476a/
Website: https://iac-intl.com/
Email: [email protected]

If you have questions about the contents of this or any other podcast episode, you can go to our ‘Questions from the Community’ page and submit a text message or video recording. We will then bring someone on to answer these questions in a future episode.