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Trelleborg sees more and more customers interested in adding sensors to their hydraulic equipment. This is not only in offshore environments, but also on civil works, like bridges, and industrial equipment like presses. These sensors can not only be used in normal operating conditions to monitor capacity, speed or force control, but also to collect and analyse data to prevent certain failure modes. This helps customers avoid significant costs associated with downtime, as well the replacement or repair of key components.

In the offshore environment, the components face extreme temperatures and need to survive in saltwater. They are also subjected to a dynamic load spectrum that influences both seals and bearings. Off-Highway industry is exposed to the harshest working conditions, where the components work under extreme temperature and pressure conditions. Even a smallest of components like seal, can bring the machine down and cause operation failure.

Strengthening the weakest link
As IoT and big data can offer significant benefits in terms of improving product performance, lowering total cost of ownership and extending application life, it is becoming an area of focus in almost all industries. This includes the off- highway industry. In the off-highway industry, keeping equipment availability as high as possible is crucial. Planned downtime needs to be kept to a minimum and unplanned downtime should be avoided. Therefore, predictive maintenance is one of the big value drivers in the digitization of this industry. Maintenance must not be too late, as this incurs extremely high costs in downtime, nor too early, to reduce maintenance costs overall.

Even though, Trelleborg provides the best sealing solutions possible for even the harshest off-highway applications, the seal is still often the weakest link in a hydraulic system. In the Cognitive Sealing approach, we use artificial intelligence to calculate a health score by analyzing sensor data that is captured around the sealing system. This is done using artificial neuro-networks, an advanced technique used in autonomous driving, for instance. This is needed as you cannot simply look at one sensor signal but must combine the data from different sensors, such as temperature, pressure, and cylinder movement. An algorithm then calculates the health score for the sealing system.

Trelleborg is currently focusing the Cognitive Sealing approach on those industries and applications in which there is a very high cost of downtime and maintenance. In off-highway applications, most maintenance happens on a fixed maintenance cycle and generally the seals are changed in this cycle. However, there is one big trend in the off-highway industry which makes management of the sealing system and monitoring seal health much more important, and that is automation. This is being brought into equipment for mining and excavators, for instance. Without a driver, you need another way to monitor the system with better remote monitoring.

To know more about Cognitive Sealing by Trelleborg Sealing Solutions,

visit: www.tss.trelleborg.com/cognitive-sealing