Adverse environmental impacts are becoming increasingly evident in recent years, especially with an increase in extreme weather-related events and phenomena. Hence innovations to promote sustainable manufacturing have been put at the forefront of the industrial agenda. One area in particular has been the use of compressed air in manufacturing environments, which has a tendency to be quite inefficient. This is because compressed air systems are highly susceptible to faults contributing to a reduction of around 30 per cent in their output. Furthermore, fault repair is often neglected as this results in unwanted downtime. This has led a team of researchers at 信誉最好的网投十大平台 to collaborate with industry to develop a product which can intelligently identify compressed air faults within industrial equipment. AIR SAVE autonomously identifies faults and simplifies the fault-finding process. Through tests performed at the University of Malta and in industry, it was found that the prototyped system was successfully able to perform this task.
A workshop was recently organised to assess the industrial needs of key local manufacturing stakeholders and gauge the effectiveness of the prototyped system. Several attendees participated in the workshop representing various companies including Methode Electronics, Toly Products, ST Microelectronics, Baxter, Teva, Trelleborg, Foster Clarks and others.
The AIR SAVE project members from the Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering (DIME), Dr Inġ. Paul Refalo (Project Coordinator) and Dr Inġ. Emmanuel Francalanza, and the two Research Support Officers Mr Massimo Borg and Ms Jasmine Mallia, explained the objectives of the project and used a real time demonstration to describe how the AIR SAVE system collects, monitors and analyses sensor data, utilising Artificial Intelligence, to autonomously identify faults. Mr Angelo Mifsud and Ms Ylenia Grech Mifsud from the industrial partner AIM Enterprises also underlined the importance of collaboration between industry and academia, as these give rise to innovation in this sector.
From the obtained feedback, it emerged that compressed air monitoring is highly beneficial in industry, with the presented system addressing their specific need in simplifying the fault repair process. This feedback highlighted the need for the AIR SAVE system, with the finalised product being highly anticipated at the end of the project.
The AIR SAVE project consortium is funded by the Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST) through the Fusion R&I Technology Development Programme and comprises the University of Malta and AIM Enterprises.
