Waste processing
Short dedicated maintenance actions prevent environmental problems
Odour nuisance and the emission of polluting materials are one of the problems where the waste processing industry has to worry about. Eventually problems with neighbouring people and environmental organisations must be prevented, something for which a condition monitoring program can strongly contribute to.
Downtime = odour nuisance
For one of our customers in the waste processing industry we monthly perform vibration analysis on the fans of all four incineration furnaces. The most critical fans for the combustion air supply and the fume extraction are directly connected to the furnace.
Any failure on one of these fans will directly lead to a hold of the incineration process. This while the supply of sewage sludge continues. The remaining three production lines are not capable of processing all this excess sludge, causing the storage bunkers to fill-up quickly. Chockfull bunkers cause odour nuisance for the surrounding area.
How condition monitoring contributes to the environment
With monthly condition monitoring measurements, any deteriorating conditions are detected and dealt with in an early stage before they lead to unplanned failures. With the knowledge that in ten days one of the fans will be shortly out of service for a bearing exchange, it is possible for the production planning to anticipate.
The sludge supply can be managed in such a way that a temporary stopped furnace will not lead to chockfull bunkers and smell and odour nuisance for the surrounding neighbourhood. Besides this, it is sufficient to only perform necessary and dedicated maintenance actions which can shorten the outage period and reduce the maintenance costs.