Accounting for the cost of material flows in production is a task that often arises in production, ensuring the implementation of the technological process. For our company, which is engaged in the implementation of solutions for the efficient consumption of steam in production, this material flow is most often saturated steam. Although we understand that production is not limited to saturated steam. Condensate, which is returned from the technological process to the boiler house or natural gas, which is used as fuel for a steam boiler, and the like, can also be subject to flow measurement.
Obviously, in order to evaluate the efficiency of steam use before and after the implementation of solutions by our company, it is necessary to measure the amount of steam that is used by the technological process. Flow meters are used to measure flow, but they only show the instantaneous flow or the total accumulated flow since the start of the measurement. But these impressions are not enough, since it is important to have information about the spent resource in the context of an hour, day, week, month, or other arbitrary period of time.
Thus, there is a need for a tool that will allow you to save readings from flow meters and generate information on the use of various material flows by production. And our company has developed such a tool. Software complex ART-Flow-Calculator. It is based on two of the latest tools for real-time data storage and visualization - InfluxDB and Grafana.
Grafana is a tool for easy visualization of data stored in the InfluxDB database. It has proven itself in thousands of applications and makes it possible to design clear infographics. Thus, the combination of InfluxDB and Grafana allows you to store, process and display data received from process parameters sensors.
It is also very easy to turn the instantaneous expense graph into a graph of accumulated expenses for each hour of the selected time range:
Visualization is accessed through a regular web browser, so there is no need to install heavy and expensive software systems on the working computers of operational and responsible personnel. Access can be granted to different users, so each interested person will have exactly the information that interests him. For example, the current values are important to the operator, because they reflect what is with the system now. The master of change is interested in hourly dynamics, because he is asked for the productivity of the shop. And the chief power engineer must report to the management, so it’s convenient for him to have a magic button “how much we consumed in a month and how much we earned.”
In the general case, the architecture of the system from the flow meter to the finished infographic on the resources spent will look like this:
Impressions from flowmeters come through intermediate gateways to the database, where they are processed in order to show them to end users through Grafana. For such an architecture, the enterprise must have a local network to make the system more distributed, since the flow meters can be located in different places of production. Of course, the lack of a local network does not exclude the introduction of the ART-Flow-Calculator complex. In this case, Artesia specialists will be able to offer a different version of the system architecture.
Video on YouTube:
