Eye on Failure is a series of maintenance stories about professionals who implemented our solution, eliminated failures and unpredicted downtime in machines. To know other cases, such as Embraer, AmstedMaxion and Ahlstrom Munksjo, visit our blog.
The company
Corteva Agriscience is a multinational company, the result of the merger of Dow Chemical and DuPont, both agricultural businesses. The company operates in three pillars: seeds, crop protection and digital agriculture, so that producers can maximize their productivity and profitability.
Its purpose is to improve the lives of those who produce and those who consume, ensuring the progress of the next generations. Corteva’s team has decades of experience in the agricultural industry focused on promoting a performance-based culture. In addition to that, the company is committed to sustainable agricultural practices for the benefit of producers and consumers on a global level.
Currently, Corteva has 4 thousand researchers, 150 research centers in 25 countries, and is present in six continents.
A history of growth
Fernando Miron Cortes Vicente is a Chemical Engineer and started at the company when it was still Dow Chemical, as a Trainee.
He became an Improvement Engineer and worked in different sectors of the company, such as Reliability and Production Engineering, which is the position he worked in for the longest time.
I started my career here and went through the transition from Dow Chemical to Corteva. From the internship until today, I’ve been in the same plant for 8 and a half years.
First contact with TRACTIAN’s solution
Having been a Maintenance Leader for a year and a half, Fernando says that his unit is not large, but it has a high production capacity.
The production process includes pastes with high solid content and encrusting characteristics. This requires good discipline of periodic cleaning to ensure a good equipment performance.
In this insight generated by the platform, an unbalance in the 1st harmonic (H1) was identified, where the established limit was exceeded. The value of H1 is very high when compared to the historical average of the period. After the alert, preventive maintenance was done and, as shown in the image below, the RMS speed levels went back below the ISO Critical Zone limit.
The platform also detected a misalignment, which is when the value of Harmonic 2 (H2) is high compared to Harmonic 1. In Corteva’s case, H2 was 30% higher than H1.
Both alerts avoided huge losses. In one of them, the insight issued managed to avoid a breakdown that could have cost between US$4,000 and US$12,000.
What sets TRACTIAN apart
For Fernando, having access to vibration, acceleration and speed profiles, and not only to global trends, is one of TRACTIAN’s greatest perks.
One of the best aspects of the platform is the ease of communication. The insights go straight to your cell phone, so you can answer them and solve the problem right away.
The engineer also highlights that the interface available is very intuitive to be managed, filled out, and handled.
The ease of installation is also another point that I like to highlight. The fact that you don’t have to install a modem or anything like that is a great advantage. I just need an outlet with electrical power and I can perform the analyses.
The company has some critical equipment that, if stopped, would affect the whole production plan. Online monitoring was able to identify 3 anomalies that had a high potential of evolution and would probably result in the failure of the equipment after a few hours.
Identifying these failures early on allowed us to make a repair that was simple, cheap, and had almost no impact on production.
To improve the practicality and reliability of your company’s maintenance, just like Fernando, contact one of our specialists and retire conventional maintenance.
