March 22, 2021

Techport takes first step for external sharing of outcomes data analytics

Techport is working on a number of innovative projects at Tata Steel. David Andreas is involved in one of these so-called use cases from IJssel Technology: "Via sensors, we monitor with various parties the condition of the rolls of Pickling Line 22 of the Tata Steel cold rolling mill. By now so much data has been collected that we have started building an architecture where the data of all parties come together. By bringing this together, we can compare different types of data and thus better assess the lifespan of certain installations. Then we will share the results with other parties."

IJssel Technology does the maintenance of the rollers installed at Tata Steel. It involves all the rollers of the eight work units. David: "We overhaul about 3,000 rollers a year. And not every roller is the same; we are dealing with some 850 variants. Together with Tata Steel, we are constantly looking at how we can better predict the life of the coils. Thanks to the data we collect, we know better and better when to change a coil. The advantage of this is that you don't replace rollers too early or too late. This allows the mechanics to use their time more effectively, which of course saves money."

The use case is a Techport collaboration between Tata Steel, IJssel Technology, Facta, Samotics and SKF. David: "What it gives us now are reports. If one of the partners sees an anomaly from the data they receive, we share it with each other. We look at what each partner saw and when. That way you get a picture from different perspectives and we learn from that. We keep track of the reports in a database and based on this we give tips to the maintenance organization. They follow up on the reports and feed this back to us. What we want to do is bring the data of all parties together automatically in one system. For this we are realizing the architecture. We have coordinated what the data of each party must meet. If everyone can meet this, then all that data will come into a database with which we can start doing analyses based on algorithms. And then we can monitor the installation even better and predict maintenance. We can then also share these analyses externally, so that even more parties can learn from this."

Also interested in this collaboration within the use case at Tata Steel? Then contact Gerik ten Berge(gerik.tenberge@techport.nl).