William Grant & Sons reduces running time by 20% 23 July 2010

The Girvan distillery on the Ayrshire coast reckons it has improved running time by around 20% since installing a motor condition monitoring (MCM) system from Artesis.

The plant, which produces one of the finest and most sought after grain whiskies in the industry at its new malt distillery in Ailsa Bay, carried out a three-month evaluation, driven by Andrew Napier, process team leader and the engineering team at the Girvan distillery.

The MCM units were installed on three separate yet critical machinery and plant applications, spanning a wide range of motor sizes (from 22kW to 250kW) on an agitator on the batch-cooking vessel, the drive motor for hammer milling of malted barley and the drive motor for hammer milling of wheat.

Napier explains that, having experienced some reliability issues with these machines in the past, at great expense to both productivity and profits, they were ideal choices for the evaluation programme.

Commenting on the MCM system now, Napier says: "One of the key deciding factors in trialling the technology was its easy and simple to install panel-mounted interface. Without any complex field wiring or devices it has the potential to provide large amounts of data regarding motor performance and energy consumption. It is this kind of information that can make a real difference to both our operations and energy consumption."

And as for the immediate benefits, he says they include a 20% reduction in the running cycle. "Over the three month period the MCM units have produced a significant amount of data, a lot of which we were able to process and analyse ourselves; with the reassuring support and guidance of the Artesis team as and when needed.

"We have been able to reduce the running cycle of the motor on the batch-cooking vessel agitator by 20%, due to improved performance and a subsequent reduction in energy consumption. It was through analysis and accurate diagnosis that we were able to make the necessary changes, thus shortening the processing time and achieving this 20% reduction."

From an operational and maintenance perspective the monitoring system also allowed William Grant & Sons to be more accurate in implementing a stop time, changing the milling screens in the malt milling application based on electrical signal analysis rather than personal judgement, he says.

Brian Tinham

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