đŚ 10x curiosity â Issue #76 -Industry of the future â Part 2 â The Field
ThinkingâŚ
Continuing into Part Two of our adventure into what the industrial work place of the future might look like. This week looking into how the workplace out in the field might change. Picking up the story one nightshiftâŚ
The pump shouldnât be running like this â something was clearly different from the check the previous operator performed merely 12 hours ago. Using the diagnostic provided on the slim tablet, coupled with the augmented reality feature, the deterioration over the day could be clearly viewed â water from the gland, an increase in vibration and a definite change in temperature of the bearing casing indicated a problem to be fixed. Whilst the vibration clearly wasnât enough to set of the sensor on the casing, it mustnât have been far off. A point confirmed when the video feed on your glasses lens bursts to life with the image of The Controller asking you the status of this very pump â it had just flagged in the control system as requiring attention!
A further check of your tablet has brought the recent history of this pump to the screen, indicating that the hours were extended and was already scheduled for maintenance in the coming week. Additional diagnostics also appear indicating that this pump has failed in a similar manner three previous times and that several other pumps, all overhauled at the same time have had this type of failure. A flick of the screen sends this to the virtual mechanical engineer for review. There will be a recommendation and root cause analysis completed for review by the onsite team by the time they come in on the morning.
While reviewing the preliminary failure data around the pump, a number of process scenarios had been run in the digital twin model, presenting the most likely cases for either stopping the pump until it can be fixed or limping it along a bit longer. The diagnostics indicate only a 15% chance of it failing over the coming 24hrs but a 70% chance of a production impact if you were to take it off right now, odds that clearly favour running it a bit longer. Conferring with The Controller provides agreement that this is the right course of action. Given the potential risk of failure however you order the clean up robot to work its magic in the vicinity of the tank and pump so that there will be easy access for the maintenance team.
It has been a while since you have seen a pump running this way, so unsure of the best temporary control you bring up the short training video onto your glasses to refresh the technique for tightening the gland bolts. The voice over feature that talks you through the job as you do it provides added confidence in safely completing the work.
With a voice command you also load the piping diagram for the equipment and by scanning the area see the augmented drawing of the pipework superimposed onto your view allowing identification of potential issues with isolation. Knowing that it is likely to come offline in the next 24hours you also call in the roving thermoscan drone to run over the pipework and make sure there are no restrictions that would need to be addressed with the equipment offline.
A growl of your tummy informs you of smoko â time to get moving. It has been a really pleasant surprise these last few months how much strain on your body has been removed since you started wearing the exoskeleton. Normally you would be aching by this point in the shift, but the device strapped to you limbs â although looking a bit futuristic â completely takes the strain from you joints. The work doesnât seem to matter any more, overhead work, vibration, heavy lifting. Any stress is now taken on the exoskeletal frame rather than your own aging body!
A final call through the Glasses, summons Larry, the autonomous buggy, to pick you up and whisk you back to smoko. Time enough for a quick snooze in the sleeping pod, before getting back at em. Pretty good nights work so farâŚ
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Links that made me thinkâŚ
USA Temperature: can I sucker you? | Open Mind â tamino.wordpress.com
Suppose I wanted to convince people that temperature in the USA wasnât going up, it was going down. What would I show? Letâs try yearly average temperature in the conterminous U.S., also known as the âlower 48 statesâ (Iâll just call it âUSAâ): Well that wonât do. It shows that temperature has been rising, notâŚ
The Product Dartboard â blog.carbonfive.com
Some projects go so well you want to bottle them. Others, not so much. This is a terrrific concept to begin to monitor the health of your teams.
Squad Health Check model â visualizing what to improve | Labs â labs.spotify.com
A lot of companies experiment with ways of measuring and visualizing how their teams are doing. Theyâre usually called âmaturity modelsâ, and involve some sort of progression through different levels. Here is Spotifyâs version
Massospora, the Parasite That Drugs Cicadas â The Atlantic â www.theatlantic.com
It also makes their butts fall off.
Oil and gas safety in a post-truth world | Safety Differently â www.safetydifferently.com
As we have long known (and as has been confirmed by Macondo, Texas City and other disasters in the industry), there is of course no meaningful relationship between slips, trips and falls on the one hand and process safety disasters on the otherâŚ
there is a correlation between injuries/incidents on the one hand, and fatalities on the other. But the relationship is invertedâŚ. a larger number of reported incidents correlates strongly with lower fatality and mortality rates (Barnett & Wang, 2000; Saloniemi & Oksanen, 1998; Storkersen, Antonsen, & Kongsvik, 2016). Unsurpirsingly, there is even a correlation between committing to a âzero accidentâ vision on a project and killing more people.