Fábio Lourenço (right) and the Diagnosis and Follow-Up Center team of Ternium Brasil.
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, the Security and Diagnosis Center can predict emergencies and equipment failures.
Ternium Brasil bets for the use of technology to improve the maintenance process of the equipment in its industrial center of Santa Cruz, in the West zone of Rio de Janeiro. In September 2021, the company created the Security and Maintenance Diagnosis Center and initiative that joins Artificial Intelligence with experience. Its purpose is to add in a defined space the vigilance of its main equipment in the plant, enabling pre-visibility in the moves and giving availability of online data in real-time.
“The idea of building this center came from the need to watch over the critical equipment, which requires diligent control. The structure matched the measures, i.e., what was measured in the steel shop, will be the same in the Blast Furnace, and in the Thermoelectric. Anyway, the idea is to standardize the vigilance of the critical equipment,” Fábio Lourenço, General Maintenance and Infrastructure Director of Ternium Brasil said.
Thanks to the most advanced technology, the Center is capable of preventing emergencies and failures in the equipment, even before the alarm sounds, avoiding emergency stops and production loss, as well as preventing incidents in the operation equipment.
Leandro Passos, Automation Specialized Engineer, assures that the system counts with 23 plant assets that are constantly checked online. According to Passos, the planning aims to increase this number to 155 in the following two years. “For making that possible, we have initiated an instrumentation project with these assets, evaluating which technique would fit best in each case. Besides, we will evaluate which predictive analytical model (alongside the AI use) fits better in each case,” he declared.
“This Center encourages us to use our innovation and technology. We have to innovate to assure our equipment is in the zones. And that will only happen if we increase and include technology in our daily life. It will help us to be more assertive in the decisions that we make. If we have to change a motor, for example, it will tell us if we must do it now or maybe later. This gives us pre-visibility in what we can do, besides, it helps the economy across the data interpretation reports,” Fábio Lourenço concluded.