Digitalisation offers added value

Even if the pres­ence of the top­ic “dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion” in the media sug­gests some­thing else: Digi­ti­sa­tion is not com­plete­ly new, as the elec­tron­ic col­lec­tion of data for the analy­sis and opti­mi­sa­tion of tech­ni­cal equip­ment has been stan­dard for quite some time. At Grund­fos, devel­op­ment engi­neers have been work­ing on bus com­mu­ni­ca­tion for years, for exam­ple: The state of the art today are inter­face mod­ules (CIM/CIU), since 2008 the GRM (Grund­fos Remote Man­age­ment, a remote con­trol) has been avail­able: The clien­t/serv­er-based GRM pro­vides the oper­a­tor with a com­plete overview of the entire plant – pumps, con­trols, sen­sors, etc. Field instal­la­tion is easy because GRM is ful­ly pre-pro­grammed – it It only takes min­utes to make the com­mu­ni­ca­tion set­tings and the prod­uct configuration.
This was lat­er fol­lowed by the CR Mon­i­tor (a Grund­fos CR mul­ti-stage high pres­sure pump mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem). CR-Mon­i­tor cov­ers cen­tral ser­vice com­po­nents that are today sub­sumed under the term ‘Indus­tri­al pump 4.0’: Mon­i­tor­ing, alarms, remote con­trol, opti­mi­sa­tion, fail­ure pre­dic­tion and intel­li­gent response.
The con­nec­tiv­i­ty of tech­ni­cal equip­ment, cloud-based data stor­age and smart device inter­faces are just the basis of dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion — prac­ti­cal tools that are impor­tant but not crit­i­cal. The smart han­dling of the gen­er­at­ed data and its analy­sis is by far the most impor­tant part of the dig­i­tal transformation.
Grund­fos has devel­oped the con­cept of iSo­lu­tions: Inte­grat­ed pump­ing solu­tions and flex­i­ble mod­u­lar sys­tems con­sist­ing of pumps, motors and dri­ves, con­trol and safe­ty mod­ules, as well as mea­sure­ment and data trans­mis­sion units. It is a holis­tic approach to the sys­tem, where pumps and sys­tems equipped with intel­li­gent mea­sure­ment and con­trol tech­nol­o­gy can be adapt­ed to the con­di­tions of each respec­tive infra­struc­ture (drink­ing water, waste­water, cool­ing, heat­ing) to ensure opti­mum flow, high over­all effi­cien­cy and max­i­mum oper­a­tional reliability.
Radio tech­nol­o­gy and Eth­er­net bus make the pump sys­tems ready for Indus­try 4.0. In this way, smart pumps can exe­cute spe­cif­ic func­tion­al­i­ties and option­al­ly also mon­i­tor oth­er process para­me­ters via addi­tion­al free interfaces.
One notable fea­ture of AutoAd­apt is its avail­abil­i­ty in a range of Grund­fos pumps: This func­tion ensures pre­cise con­fig­u­ra­tion of the sys­tem and thus max­i­mum ener­gy use. To this end, the pump con­tin­u­ous­ly analy­ses the sys­tem require­ments for changes and then adjusts the per­for­mance to ensure over­all sys­tem efficiency.