If you’ve been to our earlier blogs, you may have come across our product, Soul.

Soul has been helping our clients with industrial and commercial facilities address their energy losses in real-time and identify issues leading to downtime before they occur. 

In this blog, we discuss how one of the manufacturing industries in the forging of industrial equipment has utilised Soul to avoid downtime for their critical equipment.

Soul has 2 important aspects — hardware and platform

Hardware is the heart of the Soul, which has the capabilities to map the electricity flow across the building, using its IoT network-based hardware. It captures every crucial electrical parameter of the plant or the building in which it is integrated. Then, via a telecom network or WiFi, it can share information with the platform.

Having said that, the Soul product can also integrate with an existing EnMS (Energy Management System) via its gateway.

Now, the platform is like a brain. With its ML algorithms on the backend, it dissects the patterns and looks for clues on what is happening at the plant and why it is resulting in any ongoing energy losses. The most important thing is the ability of Soul’s ML to identify immediately the root cause behind the resulting energy losses. The speciality is that it can come up with a recommendation to fix the issue. And all of this works in real-time.

Here’s how it identified an issue for this industry, along with a recommendation to fix:

See, the factory uses electric arc furnaces to forge steel into specific shapes to provide the required industrial equipment.

When a furnace is used, it needs to operate at a high, controlled temperature. For this process, an electric arc is generated between electrodes and the metal charge, which leads to the generation of extreme heat, which melts the steel, and is then input to the furnace.

In this process, a considerable high current is taken up by the furnace system. The more the load, more could be the current that might need to be input. But it can’t be said that it is directly proportional. And here’s where it is crucial to operate it carefully without loading too much charge into the furnace.

For this industry, this furnace equipment is critical to operate and difficult to replace.

When the specific furnaces of this industry were loaded, there were voltage fluctuations which Soul observed, especially when the power was input. The Soul’s platform was able to correlate this voltage fluctuation to the overheating of the wire, leading to such voltage fluctuations.

Leaving it as is would lead to the melting of the wire that needs to be intact for the power supply and could trip the furnace.

The best thing about the Soul platform is that it doesn’t just find the root cause of an issue but also comes up with recommendations or corrective actions on how this issue can be resolved.

The picture shows how the Soul platform shows the alert.

And this is how it has been helping industries.

With real-time alerts on the root cause for energy losses or machine downtime, even before they occur and also relay corrective actions for the plant head or operator to work on.

With such systems, we’ve seen that the opportunity cost saved for the client every month is 10–40% of the energy bill.

Please do visit us on the website for more information, and maybe tell your friends about it too. It will go a long way in keeping our energy and environment managed better.