When Hershey’s Maintenance Manager Phil Reynolds suspected that his manufacturing plant was not getting the full benefit of its steam system, he began to explore options to monitor the health of the plant’s steam traps. He worked with an outside agency to do an audit of the plant’s steam system, and his team completed training in thermal imaging and ultrasonics in order to do their own manual audits or spot checks. In both cases, even if a steam trap was determined to be in working order during an audit, that could quickly change and go unseen until the next audit – or until a failure was identified. After attending a building operator certification course, he learned about the benefits of continuous monitoring using IoT sensors. But one issue remained – continuous monitoring solutions required power for the sensors, of which there could be hundreds in this plant. Delivering power to the sensors can be difficult in the steam system environments and relying on battery powered sensors was not sustainable. In this presentation we will discuss the importance of proper steam trap function and our experience with various methods for monitoring.

Takeaways

• Importance of steam trap health for manufacturing plant energy efficiency, uptime and safety.
• Various options for monitoring steam trap health.
• How battery-free sensors have enabled continuous, sustainable steam trap monitoring.

Phil Reynolds is a Maintenance Manager for The Hershey Co. He has been with The Hershey Co. for nearly three decades.

I joined Everactive prior to the launch of our first product, since then I’ve helped Fortune 500 companies throughout North America unlock new data streams to save millions of dollars, defer 100,000s of tons of CO2, and decrease downtime. I’ve had the chance to present our technology at customer sites and industry events across North America. I’m considered one of the leading advocates for batteryless sensing in the Industrial Internet of Things.

My customers include industry leaders in:
Consumer Packaged Goods
Food and Beverage production
Chemical and Pharmaceutical production
Steam Systems for heating and cooling
Oil and Gas refining