GE Adds to its Bently Nevada System 1 Condition Monitoring Software

GE’s Measurement & Control business continues to upgrade its Bently Nevada System 1 condition monitoring and diagnostics software. The latest enhancement is GE’s joint-development-and-distribution agreement with Meridium, Inc.

The agreement is aimed at providing a new Industrial Internet ( offering to connect data to business systems to boost efficiency and productivity. It will integrate Meridium’s tools with GE System 1 Asset Condition Monitoring (ACM), part of its Bently Nevada product line.

“GE’s Bently Nevada product line integrates Meridium’s Asset Health Manager and Production Loss Accounting solutions with GE’s System 1 ACM applications to help users . . . optimize their production assets,” said Art Eunson, General Manager of GE’s Bently Nevada product line.

Meridium’s tools aggregate data from System 1 and other plant maintenance systems to provide plant engineers with a holistic view of condition-based maintenance activities. Together, this enables condition based maintenance by connecting work identification and execution in near real-time.

The partnership, Eunson believes, will increase value by decreasing maintenance costs, optimizing production, and improving equipment reliability while reducing risk.

“We are realizing the increased productivity and efficiency gains by delivering analytics in real-time,” said Eunson. “System 1, on its own, provides diagnostic information on health of assets.”

It combines with other data from across the plant and feeds it into Meridium equipment strategies to provide managers with a greater understanding of operations.

For example, instead of only being able to view current vibration data, you can look at overall asset health, review trends at a machine or plant level, evaluate asset strategy and better understand risk profile. The goal is to put a plant manager in a position to better determine whether certain assets should or should not be addressed at a given point in time, and, if so, what specifically should be done within the overall plant asset strategy to optimize the total operation.

Eunson views this as part of the Industrial Internet. The general concept is to have sensors everywhere feeding data into massive databases, which are analyzed in real time to provide greater machinery insight and enable higher quality control.

“Customers are consuming massive amounts of information from many different systems,” said Eunson. “We can begin to bring these multiple streams of data into one platform.”

GE and Meridium are working to integrate ACM capability with Meridium. The new product should hit the market in the first half of 2015. In addition, GE Measurement & Control has debuted three new products from the Druck product line as the latest additions to its integrated calibration and communication solutions platform:

• Genie Maestro provides maintenance regimes and instrument engineers with information to improve workflows and increase productivity. It combines calibration and communication in a hand-held device
• The DPI611 calibration-and-indication device is smaller than its predecessor. It has twice the pressure accuracy and threetimes the electrical accuracy
•  Dry Block and Liquid Bath temperature calibrators generate real heat to a temperature of known accuracy and are used as a reference to test and calibrate other temperature devices. Dry Block calibrators offer rapid heating and cooling from - 35°C to 650°C.

www.ge-mcs.com.