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Case study
Chemical industry AI survey
How it started
A big chemical company in Bulgaria wanted to have a better control of their production when sorting, transporting and working with minerals. Solvay Sodi's soda ash plant in Devnya is the largest of its kind in Europe and one of the biggest in the world. It responds to the growing global demand for soda ash and sodium bicarbonate and offers a secured and sustainable supply of these products.
Soda ash is an essential product for manufacturing glass for building, automotive, solar panels and lithium carbonate for batteries, as well as detergents and chemicals; while sodium bicarbonate is essential in the health care, food, animal feed and flue gas cleaning markets. The continuous supply of their products is a must.
Solution
Since its establishment, the company has invested more than 800 million Euro to expand its capacity while optimizing its operations through the implementation of innovative, environmentally-friendly and efficient technologies. This resulted in significant reductions in energy use for production, water consumption and CO2 emissions, as well as a safer place to work.
Our trusted partners from Konica Minolta Bulgaria approached Metrici in implementing some of their clients requests for implementing different solutions to have a better management of their resources and adopt an innovative and efficient work flow.
At the beginning, the sole demand was for Metrici to observe the position of transport carts which carry the minerals throughout the factory. This was an easy job for Metrici to be solved with a dedicated AI training and it was implemented on the spot
The request was part of company's goal to reduce costs and expensive maintenance. Infact, it was imperative to know the alignment of each transport cart on overhead cables beyond a certain point as they travel hundreds of meters and if the position was wrong after a certain point it was a difficult task to put it back on track.
Production needed to be stopped, all transport carts be brought back, fix the one which was reversed and carry on. That is time consuming and most importantly it was an expensive operation as must be done by a qualified team and the production stops.
So Metrici was called to detect transport carts, see their position as they travel on the lines and alert when crossing a certain point if they are not in the the good position and are in fact upside down.
How it continued
As this was a success, after several month in the project, the client realized Metrici could offer more information. Another frequent problem on the factory was with bearings heating up and subsequently jamming. When this happened in the middle of the transport lane, the intervention was also an expensive nightmare.
The first natural request from the client was an alert to be raised when certain temperature was passed. But on a second talk, we realized it was a better use of the system to just constantly monitor the carts and their bearings for temperature. Not just wait for them to be broken but to alert in time before such a ting happens and raise alerts. How does Metrici do that? With a third implementation which is used both in bearings readings as well as in position cart.
Technical sheet for location
- 1 thermal camera for measuring bearing temperatures
- 1 IP camera for carts position and OCR
- Dedicated AI training
- 1 server
How it works
Each cart has a serial number. Metrici does on OCR for each cart when detected. This information is used in combination with both the other solutions. So Metrici knows what cart passes, what number it has. Secondly it checks if it's upside down or in the right position.
At the same time OCR is used in combination with bearing temperature detection. All Metrici database has information at any given time about the situation with the carts and temperature. Also, all alerts are in real time- position and temperature.
Not to mention, Metrici does an OCR reading even for upside down carts, when obviously, the serial number is also not in the correct position.
Prior to this implementation, the company had only two options to deal with jamming bearings. Once it happened and the cart was moved out of the line with immense costs to replace bearings or once in a while every cart was removed prior to jamming to inspect the elements to prevent a jamming. A technician took the decision to replace or not the bearings after the check.
So this where Metrici came into play. Metrici constantly monitors the bearings. It doesn't wait for them to reach a critical temperature, but when one has a temperature above the others, it means that is approaching a critical failure.
So Metrici triggers an alarm to the technician with photo, time stamp, serial number of the cart and temperature. It warns about possible malfunction, so the technician can take that particular cart out replace one or all bearings and put it back on the track with little to nothing costs.
Results
The company is now free of expensive interventions or constant stopping of the production to take carts out and inspect them. It is less time consuming and certainly cheaper, as Metrici constantly monitors the environment.
This came in line with Solvay policies of efficient, innovative solutions relying on Metrici AI capabilities
