Hollingsworth and Vose wanted to improve the efficiency of their compressed air system, lower the electricity expense component of manufacturing cost in their commodity industry, and conserve energy leading to lowered greenhouse gas emissions. Compressed air systems degrade over time and become leaky and inefficient. Hollingsworth and Vose wanted to increase the frequency of system inspections without paying the high cost of manual labor.

The customer’s manufacturing process takes raw aluminum billets and uses a cold rolling process to produce rolled aluminum goods. A throughput bottleneck was identified at the cooling station as the existing temperature measurement process required the crane operator to climb down from the crane regularly and perform direct measurements on the rolls.

The customer needed to monitor non-contact alignment and non-contact process temperature in different positions along a 100-meter production line. Space around the line is tight and operators and forklift trucks are passing by constantly. Installation of correctly routed cables from sensors back to the control station would have been expensive and would have taken too long and caused too much disruption to ongoing operations.