The Challenge 

ZANA is the name of the project, which mainly has the duty of heavy-duty internal combustion engines controlling and monitoring. Since most heavy-duty internal combustion engines with stationary, Marine, powerplants, and railway applications need to have a high percentage of reliability, it is mandatory to have a precise evaluation of their condition. But in order to keep the maintenance cost as low as possible, it is mandatory to have a precise prediction of the time of maintenance based on Condition Based Maintenance instead of Preventive Maintenance (PM). Although the Preventive Maintenance and Condition Based Monitoring methods have undeniable benefits, using them without a dynamic connection can not significantly reduce maintenance costs. The situation will worsen if all required conditions like specifications of fuel, oil, and road conditions could not be satisfied, leading to an early breakdown.

The Solution

Engines' online running performance, monitored by sensors and maintenance history combined with the maintenance instructions, can be evaluated to predict future possible malfunctions, failures, or breakdowns. ZANA consists of three dynamic sections. These sections are; Engine's Maintenance History (EMH), which will be updated regularly, Engine's Online/Offline Monitoring System (EOM) installed on the engine, which can be upgraded by adding new systems like torsional vibration diagnostic system, and the Engine's Maintenace Analyser (EMA). By having this information, the system can dominantly monitor the engine's operation condition. The EMH and EMA section can be installed in the controlling center, and all captured data by EOM will be sent to the controlling center to analyze all three types of data simultaneously. This helps to reduce the size of the local calculation and prevents the local system's complexity. In the case of failure prediction based on analyzed data, the appropriate alarms and action will be sent to the local system to show on display and apply the new operation map or limitations on the engine to arrive at the maintenance service. Further to this, all information will be sent to the maintenance center, and the required maintenance actions will be pre-defined. As a result, the time of failure detection and going back to track will be saved, which leads to having a higher availability and reliability.

The Mission

Implementing this system needs tripartite cooperation between, engine manufacturer, maintenance group, and operation center. The main challenge will be implementing a comprehensive connection between three defined sections of ZANA. Also, in the controlling center software, different information will be collected, and the results will be shared with service centers. Since the spare parts are one of the main concerns of the companies that do the maintenance on engines, by this system, and as a development phase, it is possible to then predict each component's ordering points based on maintenance condition after a while. Since these data update every time, their reliability will be improved over time.

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