April 21, 2023 · 4 min read
Read on to learn how the latest IoT technology is helping our planet
Our planet gives us everything. We owe it to our planet—and ourselves—to keep it healthy by reducing pollution and waste. Given the scale of the task, it's not easy. But it's not impossible, either. The latest IoT technology from Sensirion Connected Solutions’ AiSight and Nubo Sphere can help.
In November, 2022, the global population passed 8 billion. Humanity is placing a tremendous strain on our planet—we have to take care that it can continue to provide everything that we need. That means optimizing our use of resources, reducing waste, and limiting greenhouse gas production.
Here's how AiSight and Nubo Sphere are making a difference.
AiSight predictive maintenance: reducing energy consumption
We've recently experienced a period of high energy prices. This is partially due to disrupted supply, partially due to the market adjusting to account for externalities like climate change. Whatever the cause, high energy prices are both challenging and a good reason to limit energy use—especially for industry.
According to the American Energy Information Administration, industry uses about 54% of the world’s energy. Businesses with particularly high electricity and gas needs include, among others, any that convert raw materials into products, including steel, chemicals, industrial gases, and packaging and tile manufacturers. For these producers, high energy prices translate into significant costs. For example, a mid-sized glass producer in Germany will pay five to six times as much in energy costs today as they did in 2015.
To minimize the short-term effects of high energy prices, some businesses have taken measures like moving shifts to periods when energy costs are lower. But in the middle-term, production managers will have to secure their businesses’ competitiveness by limiting energy use.
AiSight's predictive maintenance solution can help reduce energy consumption.
AiSight provides a complete predictive maintenance solution for industry. This includes plug-and-play Aion sensor nodes, combining three powerful sensors in one rugged housing, plus the Machine Insight Center—next-generation predictive maintenance software that delivers alerts, analysis, and easy-to-interpret visualizations of sensor readings.
Using this solution, it's possible to predict and prevent machine breakdowns, improving equipment availability and overall efficiency. And AiSight's machine diagnostics provide further opportunities to improve machine performance and reduce energy consumption.
Mechanical systems like motors and pumps draw an incredible amount of energy. According to the International Energy Agency, industrial motors use roughly 70% of all electricity in industry. And centrifugal pumps are responsible for 20% of global energy use! When these machines don't perform optimally, they can waste an incredible amount of energy.
And that waste costs businesses. According to the US Energy Information Administration, by improving these machines’ performance, maintenance technology can reduce annual energy costs by up to 20%.
This is where AiSight's predictive maintenance solution comes in. With advanced warning of machine breakdowns, it's possible to plan all necessary maintenance and keep assets running efficiently. Plus, in the process of monitoring machines for damage, AiSight's predictive maintenance solution can identify optimal operating parameters, allowing you to reduce those machines’ energy consumption.
To use a centrifugal pump as an example, AiSight's solution can identify its best efficiency point (BEP)—the point at which its developed head and flow volumes make it operate as efficiently as possible. That means the pump will consume less energy—a welcome reprieve for industry and the planet.
To learn more about reducing energy costs using AiSight's predictive maintenance solution, download the whitepaper: Reduce energy costs with predictive maintenance here.
AiSight predictive maintenance: reducing material waste
Reducing material waste helps the environment at every point in the production chain, from raw-material production, processing, and transport, on to landfill use and waste-processing. The benefits of reducing material waste include preventing air and water pollution, saving forests, reducing traffic, and even reducing methane pollution.
AiSight's predictive maintenance solution helps reduce material waste.
Effective machine operation should deliver quality production with minimal process defects. It should also limit yield reduction caused by warmup cycles, process errors, and bad changeovers or settings. Ineffective machine operation delivers the opposite of quality production: scrap.
A high scrap rate is not only bad for the environment, it's expensive. Besides the cost of materials lost to scrap, it also takes time and resources to deal with scrap, not to mention the costs of dealing with the maintenance costs of fixing the cause of the scrap.
It also has a knock-on effect in reducing energy consumption. Producing scrap still uses energy—reducing scrap maximizes the amount of output possible with the same amount of energy.
Learn more about how predictive AiSight's maintenance solution improves equipment effectiveness here.
Protecting assets also reduces material waste. A broken-down machine, after all, is waste.
Reducing energy costs and material waste, all at once
AiSight's predictive maintenance solution has been monitoring air seal blowers in a Hamburg district heating plant. These blowers form a protective seal within coal pulverizers—machines that enable the most clean and efficient burn possible. Keeping air seal blowers running keeps these machines running better, longer. The result is more efficient material use and lower energy costs.
Learn more about how AiSight is making a difference in the energy sector here.
Nubo Sphere continuous methane emissions monitoring: reducing methane emissions, preventing global heating
Recent studies have revealed the outsized impact of methane on climate change. But in that impact lies an opportunity: reducing methane emissions will have an outsized impact on preventing climate change.
With Nubo Sphere, we can reduce methane emissions.
The numbers are sobering. Methane’s global heating impact is anywhere from 30 to 120 time that of CO2. Whatever its exact potency as a greenhouse gas, methane emissions cause 25% of global heating.
Help is on the way. New regulations and the Global Methane pledge aim to stop leaks and reduce emissions. And oil and gas producers—for whom preventing accidental leaks presents the double benefit of preventing both climate change and loss of salable product—are also on the case, adopting and developing new tools to detect leaks. With 40% of methane emissions coming from leaks in the fossil fuels industry, they may hold the key to holding off climate change.
Nubo Sphere from Sensirion Connected Solutions is that key. This innovative, end-to-end solution for methane emissions monitoring supports oil and gas producers in reliably detecting, locating and quantifying methane emissions. That means a faster response and fewer emissions.
And that's something worth getting excited about. Methane fades from the atmosphere 10 times faster than CO2. Any reduction in methane emissions will quickly translate into a reduction in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, and a brake on climate change.
To learn more about how Nubo Sphere detects and measures accidental methane leaks, download the whitepaper here.
Are you interest in seeing how these IoT solutions can help your business reduce its environmental footprint?
Get a free consultation from AiSight here.
Get a free consultation on Nubo Sphere here.
