Find out how smart your compressed air system is.
The future of technology is smart. Most people primarily experience this at home, where smart phones, TVs, refrigerators, etc. are making their lives easier. However, intelligent products have even more of an impact in industrial settings. Here, they are not only revolutionizing how things are made but also who makes them, at what cost and with which resources.
In fact, smart technology is becoming so important that any manufacturing business not investing in it soon risks falling behind.
One area in which this is especially true is compressed air. This has two reasons. On the one hand, compressing air is a process that can be optimized significantly with the use of smart technology. Connected, state-of-the-art compressors are much more efficient and reliable than their predecessors from just a few years ago. And this trend will continue in the age of Industry 4.0.
On the other hand, “getting smart” saves you money it when it comes to compressing air. That is because it is such an energy-intensive process. Over a compressor’s lifetime, the money you spend on energy constitutes up to 80% of its total cost of ownership. Therefore, the savings intelligent technology can generate far outweigh any investment costs.
There are already many ways in which you can use this technology to drastically reduce your energy consumption – and your operating costs.
Let’s look at a list of the smart options that are available to you and whether you are checking all of the boxes yet.
⃝ Smart compressors: They form the heart of any compressed air system. At the very least, you want yours to be equipped with an energy-saving variable speed drive. However, cutting-edge compressors can do much more. For example, the GA VSDS from Atlas Copco can adjust its performance to the ambient conditions to make sure that you can achieve the highest energy use reductions.
⃝ Smart controllers: Compressor controllers make sure you get the most out of your compressor at any time. The best example is the Nano™ from Atlas Copco. It is the first controller ever to receive over-the-air updates and therefore ensure that your compressor gets better over time.
⃝ Central compressor controllers: Are you using more than one compressor? Then a smart central controller like the Optimizer 4.0 is the perfect choice. It is the smartest controller available and can regulate your compressors to maximize your energy savings while keeping maintenance to a minimum.
⃝ Remote monitoring technology: You can only get the most out of your equipment if you always know how it is performing. Remote monitoring technology like SMARTLINK allows you to do just that – at any time and from anywhere. But SMARTLINK does so much more. For example, it offers recommendations on how you can save more energy or alerts you when there is a problem (and even offers suggested fixes).
⃝ Connected production: The ultimate goal of smart technology is a completely connected and largely automated production. One major step to make that happen is for different machines, e.g. compressors, production equipment and packaging plants, to be able to “talk” to each other. That allows them to work together, without human assistance, and be more efficient and productive. The most popular of these machine languages is called OPC UA – and the GA VSDS is the world’s first compressor that speaks it.
