Air Compressor Monitoring

Ingersoll Rand’s Remote Monitoring Platform Enables Customers to Maximize Uptime and Carry Out Cost-Saving System Optimizations

Maximizing machine uptime is crucial for optimizing processes and boosting productivity in the industrial sector. Understanding whether your equipment is working as intended helps you to keep your operations up and running, while also allowing you to keep your operational costs under control. Spotting system inefficiencies early can prevent costly downtime and avoid potentially expensive repairs, but most industrial customers are not prepared to monitor their compressed air equipment on their own.

As a leading provider of compression equipment and services, Ingersoll Rand offers Helix™ Connected Platform solution to give you reliable insights into your compressed air system’s day-to-day performance and condition by providing continuous real-time data, as well as service reminders and actionable machine health reports. Integrated into your compressor as a factory install or by means of a simple upgrade, the platform has helped increase reliability and produce enterprise-wide savings for numerous customers. Here are some ways Helix™ monitoring has helped two customers optimize their compressed air process.

Boosting Production Capacity

A medium-sized manufacturer has been utilizing Ingersoll Rand’s compressed air equipment and PackageCARE™ maintenance plans for years and recently added Helix™ monitoring to their system. They knew they had a problem with compressed air system capacity at their factory, which was negatively affecting their production abilities. The company, which had significantly increased its output in the preceding months, realized their production lines were not receiving enough compressed air, but suspected that an air leak in some of the downstream equipment was the cause. Helix™ monitoring proved it wrong.

Having analyzed data from the Helix™ Connected Platform, Ingersoll Rand’s service experts concluded that the factory’s compressed air system was undersized and could no longer meet the plant’s compressed air demand after the manufacturing processes were intensified. Based on the initial Helix™ insights, the Ingersoll Rand Account Manager set up IntelliSurvey monitoring for a week to develop an in-depth profile of their needs. The IntelliSurvey output confirmed what the Helix™ data suggested – the company’s increased production required more compressed air than their current system could produce.

As compressed air is critical to this customer’s processes, finding a quick solution that helped avoid any downtime was of utmost importance. The Account Manager quickly secured an additional Ingersoll Rand air compressor that met the customer’s process requirements and installed it within a week. As a result of the invaluable information obtained via the Helix™ dashboard and the timely reaction on the part of Ingersoll Rand’s experts, the customer’s compressed air capacity was doubled in no time at all and they were able to meet their process requirements.

Lowering Power Bills

Another customer, a large, multi-national food and beverage company with a global presence has been utilizing Ingersoll Rand products and services for over 14 years and also recently enabled Helix™ monitoring devices on their compressed air equipment. The customer, who uses PackageCARE™ service program to ensure the highest level of protection for their air compressors, recently became aware of an issue with excessive energy consumption at one of their plants, but was not able to tell which part of the manufacturing process was to blame.

Helix™ monitoring quickly helped Ingersoll Rand’s service team detect the underlying problem. The Account Manager quickly alerted the customer and come up with a way of solving the issue. Insights from the platform enabled our engineers to discover that the plant’s compressed air equipment was running unloaded for an excessive amount of time. As it turned out, the system controller’s set points had changed and were no longer optimized, which was confusing the compressors. This resulted in unnecessary unloading, starts and stops, leading to uneconomical and unsustainable equipment performance and driving up power bills.

Having obtained initial insights from the Helix™ platform, Ingersoll Rand experts followed the standard system assessment process and quickly went from problem identification to problem resolution. In less than a month after getting the first Helix™ platform alert, the customer’s air compressors were recalibrated, which immediately restored the desired system performance levels and brought savings for the food and beverage producer.

Reliability and Savings Everywhere

Insights provided by the Helix™ Connected Platform enabled Ingersoll Rand to alert these two customers to the true sources of their process issues and suggest the right solutions to them before the customers even understood their problems. This saved them time they would have invested in looking for problems where they did not exist and costs which would have resulted from downtime and process inefficiencies. Most importantly, it allowed both customers to enjoy the peace of mind that their compressed air systems could meet the challenges that their production processes demand. Both companies appreciate the increased confidence in the reliability of their compressed air system thanks to the data provided by Helix™ Connected Platform and have expanded the scope of their products and service contracts with Ingersoll Rand.

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