Portable Shaker Table Ensures Quality Asset Health Monitoring

In the industrial market, the cost of downtime due to equipment failures can be millions of dollars per hour. Companies can’t afford to have unplanned failure, and vibration monitoring has existed for 30 years to help predict problems.  Petasense, an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) startup, sees a commitment to quality data as key to drive their robust, wireless predictive maintenance solution and stand out from other companies in the market. 

Petasense is a Silicon Valley based startup providing complete cloud-based Asset Reliability and Optimization solutions to industrial clients. Allowing clients to assess machine health with a simple to understand asset health score, the company’s mission is to “eliminate unplanned downtime and unnecessary repair costs from the world of manufacturing.”1

Petasense supplies wireless vibration and temperature sensors plus cloud based storage and machine analytics.  Those pieces work together to allow a customer to understand the condition of a machine from the moment the system is installed. Moving the sensor data from individual sites to the cloud has allowed Petasense improve efficiency for its customers. By comparing a machine’s real-time condition to its baseline, Petasense provides the customer with an immediate and continuous understanding of the health of their assets.

The need for good data drives Petasense’s development process.  Their Vibration Mote sensor, built in an ISO 9001 facility, is calibrated in house to ensure clean data is at the heart of Petasense’s asset reliability databases, giving them an advantage over other competitors. But they don’t just build the sensor: they test each and every sensor over at least 15 frequencies (60 frequencies for Model 2) using The Modal Shop’s Portable Shaker Table Model 9100D.  According to Simon Xu, Hardware Engineer, “We’re a Machine Learning cloud-based IoT company. In order to use Machine Learning properly, our data needs to be good. We pay a lot of attention to ensure our data quality is good.” Sensor calibration is essential to this effort. Performing such extensive testing with a calibrator produced by a certified vibration calibration lab such as The Modal Shop ensures a traceable measurement chain and allows the company to provide customers with a calibration certificate available via the cloud for each and every Vibration Mote sensor.

Of the Model 9100D, Mr. Xu says, “I like the simplicity of the product.  It has just two knobs and is easy to figure out. We have people who are not engineers who are able to use it to check sensors to make sure the response is looking okay.  We’ve even had high school students use it. It’s a good design.” He also appreciates the portability of the shaker.  It can be taken right to a customer site to troubleshoot issues. Finally, having tested thousands of sensors with the product, he can report that the shaker provides accurate, consistent, and repeatable results.

The Modal Shop’s 9100D portable shaker is an important part of the development process for Petasense, allowing this up and coming Internet of Things company to provide their customers with the best possible machine health information.

https://petasense.com/industry-4-0-petasense-makes-industrial-machines-smarter/