Remote monitoring takes the guess work out of performance.
Compelling cost benefits accrue to owners who protect their assets from the outset by investing in remote diagnostics technology at the newbuild stage.
Though widely adopted, the Remote Diagnostics Services offered by ABB are mainly delivered to existing vessels. Requests to install such capability as part of the vessel’s specification are the exception rather than the rule.
This appears counter-intuitive, given that the whole point of preventive maintenance is to maintain equipment in its best possible condition. The RDS offered by ABB monitors, measures and alerts to faults on vessel thruster systems, propulsion systems, drilling systems, motors, generations, drives, transformers and switchgears through to protection relays, instrumentation and automation systems. In general terms, the company says RDS can lead to a 25% reduction in maintenance costs.
In fact, arguments for installing remote condition monitoring are even more compelling for owners at the newbuild stage. Baseline data drawing on the service history of critical equipment will deliver immediate and through-life benefits, the company points out.
Immediate response
The benefits of RDS have proved persuasive as a support for operations because skill-sets onboard ships are being faced by increasingly greater technical sophistication. RDS identifies system anomalies in real-time and logs them centrally in high definition data. This enables the ABB engineers to start fault-tracing immediately after the remote connection is established.
Kenneth Nakken, ABB Global Solutions Manager, Remote Diagnostics Services, says: “The root causes of most technical problems onboard are often very clear, with the benefit of hindsight. But identifying them at the time can be difficult and complex due to a lack of data consistency, or the fact that information is just not available.
“Using RDS, Jobs are logged and the advisory service usually kicks in within half an hour of an inquiry being made, with a guarantee that a response will be forthcoming within an hour. There is always a technical engineer on duty at the ABB Global Technical Support center, so that the ship’s engineers can be offered guidance as quickly as possible on any technical issue. The approach is also the fastest way to identify root causes, and whether an ABB engineer needs to be dispatched to the ship.”