Timely inspection and repair of utmost importance

At the Britvic facility in Rugby, Great Britain, hundreds of pumps ensure the daily production of a diverse range of soft drinks. Vast and complex production lines operate around the clock, and even a single pump malfunction can bring production to a halt for several hours.

The Britvic production team looked for a condition monitoring system that would enable them to focus on specific, critical parts of production, leaving time for other important tasks. Timely inspection and repair are especially important at the Rugby facility, given that the plant operates a wide variety of pump types and cannot keep spare parts for all of them. Early warning of potential failure is therefore extremely important to plan and facilitate prompt maintenance to avoid downtime.

Preventing sudden pump failure

To prevent potential pump failure, the Britvic team decided to install the Alfa Laval condition monitoring solution on 107 centrifugal pumps when the opportunity arose. In just a few months, the system proved its worth when a notification came through, warning of a potential issue with a pump that would never have been discovered without the monitoring system. The notification enabled the technical team to inspect and repair the pump before an actual failure occurred.

Just this one notification paid for our entire investment in the condition monitoring solution and the first year of our Analytics subscription”, said Chris Heslop, Engineering Specialist at the Rugby facility.

Britvic purchased the condition monitoring hardware and installed the CM sensors on 107 LKH pumps.

Saved six hours of unplanned downtime

Thanks to the Analytics notification, the technical team could take out the critical pump for maintenance. It took just 45 minutes to disassemble, repair, and reinstall the pump, which saved six hours of unplanned downtime and prevented a production loss of 288,000 bottles of soft drink.

Supporting Britvic’s sustainability strategy

One of Britvic's sustainability targets is to reduce the water consumption ratio in manufacturing year after year, and water efficiency projects are carried out across sites to achieve this.

The implementation of condition monitoring helped improve the water efficiency at the Rugby facility. Thetimely detection and repair of the pump saved four hours of unexpected CIP (Cleaning-In-Place) and, consequently, 2,000 litres of water plus energy and chemicals used in the CIP process.

The early fault detection also improved the pump life cycle.

Considering expanding condition monitoring

With the positive experiences gained from using Analytics for online condition monitoring, the Rugby facility is contemplating expanding the solution to include more pumps within the manufacturing area. Day by day, the collection of data and helpful insights continues to grow, enabling the early detection of potential machine failures and the identification of root causes.