Seetalabs proudly announces the arrival of Feralpi group as clients for management of industrial transformers in their steel plants. Feralpi group is a renowned player in the steel industry with a production history of more than 2.5 million ton of steel across Europe and North Africa. With their expanding business and surging demands, they are now seeking smart ways to manage their strategic industrial (furnance) transformers inside their steel plants. Their end goal is to strike an optimum balance between cost, time, and quality of operation, maintenance, and production.

What is an industrial transformer?

Industrial transformers are strategic units that play a key role in improving the production capacities of metal processing industries such as steel, aluminium, copper, etc. Industrial transformers are categorized as furnace and convertor transformers. A furnace transformer provides the electrical arc needed to melt the raw materials inside the furnance, such as in iron & steel industries. Therefore, it is essential for an asset manager to identify and maintain the overall health and reliability of such strategic transformers to avoid unplanned downtime without compromising production capacity.

Challenges in maintaining industrial transformers

The transformer industry is feverishly catching up to the ideology of condition monitoring and risk based asset management. As per the available standards, each transformer is required to undergo a set of diagnostic testing to ascertain its overall health and operational reliability. Under such circumstances, it is obvious to accumulate huge amount of condition monitoring data, some of which can be inevitably redundant. One of biggest challenges in risk-based assessment is to identify and remove such redundancies to improve end-result accuracy and implement the correct health-indexing strategy.

Feralpi’s response on Ronin performance

We proposed our data management and complexeity resolution solution, Ronin AI-Dashboard, to one of the Italian steel plants of Feralpi group. Ronin provides an extended ability to organize the asset’s condition monitoring data in a fuss-free way. But that’s not the only appreciable point. Ronin also allowed their asset managers to visualize the efficacy of their management actions by trend analysis of transformer health index over time. This allowed them to dramatically reduce their decision making time on management/ maintenance actions, even with the lack of data.

For an asset manager that is not actively involved in daily monitoring of their transformers, such a solution can provide an excellent quick glance on the immediate condition and reliability of an entire fleet within seconds. The uploading of desired input data into Ronin was observed as the easiet and totally fuss-free. Ronin AI-Dashboard allows them to view, analyze, and manage future actions, downtime or repair schedules, and data extraction.

Above all, one of the best outcomes for Feralpi using Ronin AI-Dashboard was their improved knowledge on the remaining life of their transformers. This estimation will in future become their key point in reducing insurance risks and help them in better negotiation of premium plans.