SIBRE´s SMART opens up a new world in the field of monitoring systems and is a powerful tool for corrective and preventive brake maintenance. Automation and remote control seem to play an ever greater key role in the plans of terminal operators with more and more remote controlled cranes already largely automated at a number of ports. Industrial brakes manufacturer SIBRE Siegerland Bremsen will support this development with a new remote monitoring system for its brake systems. The system, referred to as ‘SMART’, is going to be presented at TOC Europe in June this year, followed by a market launch in the fourth quarter of 2014. SMART stands for ‘SIBRE Monitoring, Analysis and Remote Technolog y ’ and is the logic al development of the well-known SIBRE SMS status monitoring system. While SMS still required the presence of a technician on site, SMART provides remote monitoring of all SIBRE brake systems in a crane via its web interface. Thus, the new system combines stateof- the-art sensor and bus technology on the one hand with advanced internet network, database storage and data security technology on the other. A third component is data mining software to generate reports, statistics and analysis of the sensor data from the brake systems.
SIBRE SMART – how it works
“As the name suggests it is a smart piece of technology,” explains Jose Garcia, electrical engineer in charge of SMART at SIBRE Brakes Spain S.L. “It is an easily accessible monitoring system that is remotely controlled and intelligent, using the generated statistics to forecast the performance of your equipment.” “The different technologies are there, well-proven and successfully working in a number of contexts. For example, remote maintenance of automation systems via phone or internet is an established standard in other industries. We combine these technologies to enable the customer to permanently and remotely monitor SIBRE brake systems in ports from anywhere in the world via the internet whether this is from pc, laptop, tablet or smartphone.” The signal chain starts with the different sensor data of a single crane brake such as brake open/closed, manual release, pad wear limit, lining temperature, reserve stroke, critical stroke, clamping force (load pin) and spring force (load cell). Further sensor data such as oil temperature, oil level, filter and motor runtime come from the hydraulic power unit of the brake system. The sensor data of this brake (or of several brakes in a crane) are routed to a centralised information terminal (touchscreen, PC) housed in the crane, using a SIBRE bus. The routing of all sensor data from the information terminal to the crane PLC is possible through a profibus and SMART server using XML or similar mark-up languages. In parallel, all sensor signals of brakes are directly transferred to the crane PLC. Furthermore, the central information terminal will transmit a Wi-Fi signal, thus enabling easy support for all maintenance tasks via tablet.
Smooth data streaming
So far, the signal chain …
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