Wireless monitoring with SaaS solved IT security challenges for Swedish water treatment company
Water treatment facilities play a crucial role in ensuring the availability of safe and clean water for various purposes, contributing to public health, environmental protection, and sustainable development.
Pumps are vital parts of a water treatment facility. Serving a critical function in the operation, their importance is highlighted in various aspects of the water treatment process, such as water intake, filtration, and distribution. The criticality of these pumps makes it essential to monitor them with a well-functioning condition monitoring program to avoid unplanned stoppages and breakdowns and ensure a stable water supply to a large urban area.
This Swedish public utility company previously monitored its pumps through route-based measurement with the handheld Leonova Diamond instrument. However, the sheer number of pumps and measuring points made the manual effort too extensive, and a new approach was needed.
IT security challenges
Solving the problem of time-consuming manual measurement on the pumps, the Airius LTE-M wireless vibration sensor was a perfect fit for the customer and the application. The sensors measure triaxial vibration and temperature, providing valuable insights into mechanical issues such as imbalance, misalignment, resonance, cavitation, and gear and bearing faults.
However, the water industry's stringent IT compliance and data security requirements presented a challenge. This water treatment company allows no in- or outgoing data communication between local, on-premise IT infrastructure and external infrastructure/devices.
Condmaster as a SaaS solution
Following extensive discussions and careful testing, it was determined that the SaaS solution Condmaster Cloud would meet all data security requirements, making it possible to utilize the power of Airius LTE-M, with Leonova Diamond as a complement. This enabled the utility company to monitor more measuring points more efficiently to ensure a stable water supply. Furthermore, Condmaster Cloud eliminated the need to manage operation and maintenance, software updates, backups, and security, thus putting less strain on the IT department.
This condition monitoring solution highlights how the rise of IIoT and rapid advances in wireless communication technologies enable automated data collection with flexible, scalable, and cost-effective connectivity in environments implementing strict IT security protocols.