Customer Success Story
Fewer Unscheduled Shutdowns, Even in Atex Zones


Benefits
Early alerts in the event of a change in condition
Greater safety for employees – an app keeps the maintenance team informed about the condition of the machine at all times
Easy to install and use
Challenge
Rapeseed processing explained simply
Following delivery of the oilseeds they are first cleaned and stored before pressing. Press cakes and extracted oil are the intermediates. Animal feed in pellet form is produced from the press cake, while vegetable oil or biodiesel are recovered from the extracted oil depending on downstream processing and refining.
In one of the largest oil mills in Europe, 28 maintenance specialists from Viterra Magdeburg ensure the smooth running of processes in the company’s three plants. The company manufactures and produces biodiesel, rapeseed meal pellets and glycerine for the food, feed and cosmetics industries. To prevent unscheduled downtimes in the various manufacturing processes, manual measurements are carried out at regular intervals on process-critical machines.
Two maintenance specialists explain why the maintenance team in Viterra Magdeburg was also seeking an alternative, additional monitoring solution:


Solution
Schaeffler’s experts recommended the OPTIME condition monitoring solution. This scalable solution consists of wireless sensors, a gateway and digital services based on proprietary Schaeffler algorithms.
At Viterra Magdeburg, machines and their units with high criticality were fitted with OPTIME sensors. There are currently 33 sensors monitoring these machines, for example motors or pumps in the oil mill.
The monitoring solution is also used in potentially explosive zones. OPTIME 5 Ex sensors are rated for potentially explosive atmospheres to Ex-Zone 1/21 as per ATEX/IECEx. At Viterra Magdeburg, these are used to monitor two separators, an Ex pump and two sensors on an “extractor”.
In the first 10 months in use, two unscheduled downtimes were avoided. The following case study shows how the maintenance team was alerted to a fault.
Case study: Alarm message motor damage
In October 2022, the maintenance team got an alarm message on the drive of the screw feeder on a final pressing machine The maintenance team took a manual measurement to confirm that the problem was motor damage, so the motor was then scheduled for replacement during the next planned shutdown. In the interim, the monitoring system provided the team with an overview of the condition of the screw feeder at all times to allow it to respond accordingly in the event of a rapid deterioration.