The Sibelco Galong site produces lime for agricultural uses including farming canola and grain. The site produces approximately 300,000 tons per year which is approximately 1/4 of the demand for the Australian state of New South Wales. Apart from agricultural purposes, a major consumer of lime from the Galong is the Port Kembla steel works. The latest lime kiln was built at the mine in 2003/04 to allow the production of quicklime for use in cement.

The lime kiln has several high criticality fans, pumps and feed conveyors that require monitoring. This service was completed by flying consultants in to perform manual vibration analysis. Obviously this is a costly exercise.

To help reduce costs and provide even greater visibility to machine condition on a remote site, Sibelco commissioned a Vibration Monitoring System from Minnovation to monitor it’s key assets on one of it’s remote sand mines. The system was commissioned to collect data from the Kiln ID fans as well as other critical assets and blowers around the site.

A Machine Health Gateway was installed to aggregate the feeds from the wireless sensors and provide real time continuous monitoring of the high speed ID fan. After cross reference the consultants services were reduced and after the initial payback period, an overall cost saving was achieved.