Ensuring that maintenance interventions are done only when needed and reducing breakdowns are key ways to reduce maintenance costs.
For compressed air and pumps efficiency and reliability are directly linked.
Efficient equipment is more reliable therefore monitoring your system could reveal key insights into the health of your equipment.
Key Performance Indicators-KPI’s
When monitoring performance KPI’s are critical. They evaluate the success of a particular activity. They help us identify where we are and where we are going.
Some of the goals linked to KPI’s could include:
- Savings goals: Reducing energy consumption, leaks
- Maintenance goals: Reducing maintenance costs
- Production goals: Allocating cost of compressed air
Here are four critical KPI’s as defined by CSA C837-16 Standard: Monitoring and Energy performance of compressed air systems
SSP: System Specific Power
Units: Kw/100 cfm
- Average KW of energy used to produce 100 cfm of air.
- Indicator of how efficiently compressed air is being produced.
TEC: Total Energy Consumption
Measure of the total energy KWH consumed over a baseline period.
The lower the energy consumption the lower the electrical costs.
SEC: Specific Energy Consumption
The amount of compressed air system energy required to produce a specific output. ie. the energy intensity. How much compressed air is required per unit produced.
PNPU: Proportion of Non Productive Usage
The is the estimate of percentage of non productive air consumption compared to average flow.
Recommendations
If you would like to monitor the performance of your compressed air system here are some steps you can take:
- Define goals and KPI’s:
- Savings goal: Reduce overal energy consumption by 5%. KPI Specific Power (Kw/100cfm).
- Collect data:
- Determine which data is required for your KPI’s. Eg. Flow rate and power. Collect the data by connecting sensors to a monitoring system.
- Track the results and define corrective actions
- Determine your starting point.
- Define target best on company goals.
- Track KPI’s then identify improvement projects.
- Track KPI”s after energy saving measures.
If you want to find out more about our performance monitoring solutions contact us now!