Digitalization of electrical infrastructure for process industries

Marc Elliott 

Marc has over 25 years of experience with Eaton serving in roles of increasing responsibilities including sales engineer, product manager, engineering manager, regional sales manager and plant manager before being appointed to his current role as Marketing Director – Mining, Metals & Minerals and Pulp, Paper & Wood of Eaton’s electrical business. Marc has a broad range of experience with industry solutions related to power distribution, energy management, motor control and factory automation serving the process industries, OEMs, and institutions. He is involved in a variety of global industry standards and presently serves as an active member of the IEEE Industry Applications Society (IAS) Cement Industry Committee, the IEEE IAS Pulp and Paper Industry Committee, the Association of Iron & Steel Technology (AIST) Electrical Applications Technical Committee and the AIST Digital Transformation Committee. Marc has been published in various periodicals such as the IEEE IAS magazine and World Cement. He received a B.S.M.E. from the University of Michigan and an M.B.A. from Seattle University.

CREW: Welcome to Eaton's 10 and 10 podcast, where we focus on industry trends, shaping the future of power management. In this series, our expert answers 10 questions about one of today's most talked-about industry topics in 10 minutes or less, from the energy transition to digital transformation and beyond. We explore trends and discuss strategies for delivering safer, more efficient, and reliable power.

INTERVIEWER: In a changing energy landscape, digitalization of your electrical infrastructure is as important as digitalizing your IT and OT. Today, we're joined by Marc Elliott, Eaton's marketing director for process industries, including mining, metals, and minerals and pulp paper and wood. Marc will answer 10 questions in 10 minutes on current trends in intelligent power management for process industries, including their increasing importance in a changing energy landscape and some common-use cases for digitalizing electrical assets.

Let's get started. What are some of the operational issues driving digital transformation for process industries, and why is digitalization of electrical technology as important as the digitalization of IT and OT?

MARC ELLIOTT: The process industries have been digitalizing their operational infrastructure since the advent of the PLC. Nowadays with digital control systems, or DCS, operators and engineers can be alarmed and access data remotely even through a smartphone, allowing them to troubleshoot and/or deploy someone to deal with production problems. These systems focus specifically on operational equipment, the process, but what happens when the breaker upstream has a fault or poor power quality is causing your electronics to flicker or even go offline?

All the process machine relies on your electrical infrastructure, the motor control center, the switchboard or switch gear, feeding the power to the production line, even the lighting systems. Together, they are your electrical technology, and they power your operations.

INTERVIEWER: Machine learning and AI now support some highly-skilled processes, like assessing the characteristics of molten steel during a pour. How can this be applied to electrical technology?

MARC ELLIOTT: Since all of your operational processes depend on your electrical equipment, there's a new focus on bringing the same kinds of monitoring analytics there. For example, one of the key controlling factors in regulating the temperature of the milk process you mentioned is the feedstock for the plate to pour. It's highly dependent upon the electrical power feeding the heating elements, which in turn fluctuates dramatically as the iron ore or recycled steel in the case of an EAF, an electrical arc furnace, is heated up and the other ingredients are added.

Trust me, this is not easy. Imagine cooking a roux with a 1 ton pot heated to 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit at 69,000 volts. While the color in the shape of the pour is imperatively important, it's directly related to the quality of the power source feeding the heating elements.

Understanding your electrical equipment can help you, one, improve your power quality, which affects efficiency and operational goals, two, power usage insights, which impact financial and ESG objectives, three, inform proactive condition-based maintenance, which is safer for personnel and equipment, and, four, improve the response time, leading to efficiency and proactivities gains.

INTERVIEWER: Electrical equipment is a long-term investment. Talk about how to get started with digitalization of what may be decades-old equipment.

MARC ELLIOTT: A great way to introduce digitalization is in your maintenance and modernization programs. When properly maintained, electrical assets can last a long time even in harsh industrial environments. Start with a known issue, an asset that has regular failures or stoppages. Fixing those can yield a rewarding ROI and doesn't get overly complicated. You can use stranded data to improve asset utilization.

Many smart relays, motor overloads, or drives have communications already built in, but they aren't connected to anything. Connecting those devices can give you actionable insights on equipment where data was previously collected manually or not even at all, or a safety and reliability win connect assets in remote or hazardous areas. For example, the health of a motor or motor starter for a remote pumping station, or the temperature and humidity of an electrical substation that's difficult to access or has high arc flash energy ratings.

INTERVIEWER: What are the risks that hold industries back from embracing digitalization, and what advice would you give them?

MARC ELLIOTT: The elephant in the room in any discussion about digitalization is cybersecurity. But I look at it this way. If hospitals can use it, you can too. In our hybrid approach, combining on-premise and cloud-based solutions, you can leverage the best of both worlds and develop a cybersecurity approach that ensures you minimize risk while taking advantage of the efficiency and productivity gains digitalization can provide.

For example an on-premise system can present real-time visualizations that would be cost prohibitive and inefficient to push to the cloud, but you can push a subset of that data to the cloud, plus capture stranded data that's not easily connected to an on-premise solution. That gives you additional data as well as the advantage of the cloud for software updates, analytics, sharing dashboards, alerts, alarming and reporting with your teams.

Each of these systems has its own requirements and considerations. So work with a vendor that understands both and can provide a risk assessment and then put a solid plan in place. Make sure your plan includes both using secure systems and ensuring that the system remains secure over time.

INTERVIEWER: Safety remains a top priority within industrial operations. How does digitalization help companies improve worker safety?

MARC ELLIOTT: A recent department of energy report says that electrical consumption by industry has increased 13-fold since the 1950s. Given the energy transition, it's likely that electrical consumption will continue to rise. So we continue to see additional exposure to electrical and nonelectrical people. A recent IEEE study of OSHA, 140 reports revealed that almost 70% of electrical fatalities are nonelectrical workers. But what's the good news? That digitalization is a game changer for worker safety.

Using IIOT sensors and software to detect what equipment conditions begin to change, production facilities know where and when an issue is beginning and can send personnel with the right skill set, parts, tools, and PPE into the field once to respond before equipment is damaged or causes downtime. So fewer and better informed deployments into the field mean lower risk to personnel. And digitalization will also have a direct impact on mechanical lifecycle improvements and other safety matters.

INTERVIEWER: Efficiency and productivity are key in maximizing ROI, and oftentimes, can be heavily affected by manual processes. How can companies digitalize their systems and use those tools to shift from reactive to conditional maintenance?

MARC ELLIOTT: You'd be surprised how much data is still collected manually even in the more modern process industry sites. But even when data is captured digitally, a person often needs to work with that data, turn into useful or actual information. In January of 2023, NFPA 70B, which is for electrical equipment maintenance, was upgraded from a best practice to a standard. This is relevant because NFPA standards are what organizations like OSHA use to regulate industry, making them a legal requirement.

One of the steps identified in this new standard about how often equipment needs to be maintained includes the concept of detectability. You can detect a need for maintenance through digitalization, IIOT sensors paired with software that turns equipment data into actual information. That's a great example where digitalization can help get the task done. Properly choosing what assets you need to monitor so you can do maintenance repairs on them as needed. Not waiting till something fails or just deciding periodically whether it needed or not.

While NFPA is safety focused, the insights you'll gain from digitalization of your electrical equipment for maintenance go beyond safety to address other KPIs, including overall equipment efficiency and energy usage.

INTERVIEWER: Industrial companies are highly focused on ESG goals. How does digitalization of electrical technologies help them meet those goals and support compliance?

MARC ELLIOTT: The ESG topic could be its own 10 and 10 podcast with all the ways they correlate. Let's take a look into just a couple, energy consumption and emissions. Manufacturers typically define energy usage KPIs around energy use per square foot or per volume, such as feet or tonnage of the product produced. Production equipment draws a lot of power. So how do we control and improve our use of power when the machines are running or startup versus idle or even considering them off versus on grid?

Digitalization provides insights into these questions so you can better understand the efficacy of machinery as failure damage can lead to shutdowns. And restarts can be taxing to your power consumption, sometimes leading to peak power demand charges, which is directly related to your power consumption or scope-1 emissions.

It also helps to understand total internal consumption, including what percentage of power you're paying for is usable due to power factor harmonics or other power quality issues, and therefore not contributing to your productivity. And it can help you determine when to use a specific power source at your disposal, power from utility, on-site generation, solar wind, or batteries.

INTERVIEWER: The skilled worker shortage is something nearly every process industry contends with. How can digitalization help with this issue?

MARC ELLIOTT: Digitalization helps in two ways. First, it greatly reduces any time spent on manually capturing data and on interpreting that data. Digital solutions handle both of those tasks, which means your electricians and maintenance teams don't spend time on work that doesn't require their specialized skills. Second, because digital solutions not only capture data but also make actionable. Your team can be far more efficient. Seeing the start of a trend toward an issue gives them time to plan and accomplish repair before it causes damage or unplanned outage.

INTERVIEWER: How can process industries apply concepts like OEE to electrical technology? It would be great to talk about this in terms of value.

MARC ELLIOTT: It's relatively straightforward to put value on improving yield or output, but cost avoidance is harder to measure. Putting a value on not losing electrical power or having poor power quality can feel like fuzzy math, but you can't make your yield or output numbers if your machinery doesn't have power. While it's not easy to dollarize this, you likely know what a downtime incident costs. You have a list of interrupters or problems you try to address every day. As you think about those disruptors, could ET be the root cause?

Digitalization can both help you determine if ET is contributing to operational issues and support effective and timely maintenance to correct problems caused by electrical equipment issues. Improving power quality and ensuring that equipment is up and running has value, from reducing downtime events to ensuring you can use all the power that you're paying for.

INTERVIEWER: You've helped us understand the concept of digitalization of electrical infrastructure. Let's close our conversation today with how industrial companies are implementing this.

MARC ELLIOTT: There are several common applications of digital enablement to better understand and maintain electrical technology as well as improved energy efficiency and power quality. The most common applications for digital technology include understanding and managing the use of power across a facility or facilities and ensuring equipment health. And process industries, that can include monitoring substations, monitoring motors and motor controllers, continuous thermal monitoring, and monitoring equipment in remote or hazardous areas.

INTERVIEWER: This has been great. Thank you for sharing your insights today, Marc. To learn more about how we're enabling the future of Industry 4.0, visit us at eaton.com.