IIT Kharagpur and Tata Metaliks jointly develop predictive maintenance algorithm to improve profitability of production jobs

IIT Kharagpur researchers at the institute’s Centre of Excellence for Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, have developed a predictive maintenance algorithm to improve the profitability of production jobs through substantial savings in productivity, downtime, cost and manpower. The data-driven predictive maintenance module has been successfully tested by Tata Metaliks for user-level acceptance.

Deployed on a gearbox of Annealing Furnace, the algorithm was tested for its ability to cluster various operating modes of the gearbox and outliers, adaptability to recognize new operating modes and predict impending failures, threshold flags for anomaly detection as well as tracking health state of the industrial assets.

Tata Metaliks has projected that the algorithm would have the potential for great savings from a predictive maintenance perspective. Based on various performance measures, an indirect increase in productivity was estimated to be Rs 1 crore annually along with a direct decrease in (i) annual downtime by 40-hours, (ii) annual manpower requirement by 400 hours and (iii) cost by Rs 8 Lakh. Tata Metaliks has developed a graphic user interface to display and retrieve the algorithmic data computation.

Prof Akhilesh Kumar, associate professor, dept. of industrial systems engineering, IIT Kharagpur said: “My goal was to develop generic diagnostic and prognostic algorithms that are rapidly configurable, and adaptive to facilitate effective and efficient large-scale deployment of Predictive Maintenance 4.0 (PdM4.0) technology for a wide variety of equipment/assets”.

Tata Sons along with IIT Kharagpur hold the licensing rights for this algorithm. Dr Purnendu Sinha, Technology leader-IoT & Analytics, Group Technology & Innovation Office, Tata Group, one of the collaborators on this project, strongly believes that such an initiative will enable the widespread acceptance of Industry 4.0 as a data-driven paradigm. Mohit Kale, general manager (engineering services), Tata Metaliks said: “In the era of the fourth industrial revolution, it is undeniable that the industrial community is looking for better Proof-of-Concept to embrace IoT based applications, and this project builds such confidence”.

“As India is determined to achieve the goal of Aatma Nirbhar Bharat, we must bridge the gap from lab to land by means of translational research. Academic research which can be directly tested by industries will not only improve the commercialization prospect but it will transform our centres of excellence as hotbeds of industrial innovations. This is the vision with which the Centre of Excellence for Advanced Manufacturing Technologies was set up by the Department of Heavy Industries, Government of India and a consortium of six industries and I am glad it is living upto the expectations,” opined Prof Virendra K Tewari, director, IIT Kharagpur.

Prof. Surjya K Pal who is heading the Centre called the development a great success of the industry-academia collaborative platform. “This is another significant milestone in our goal to deliver Industrial IoT innovations to India’s manufacturing sector thus graduating it to Industry 4.0. The industrial collaborations make it possible to progress through the technology readiness levels and design systems which can be adopted by the industries,” he said.