Assessment of a diagnostic procedure for the monitoring and control of industrial processes

The definition of “energy efficiency” entails programming, planning and implementation of operational tools and strategies leading to the reduction of energy demand for the same offered services. Among the typical industrial energy uses, the production of compressed air represents certainly an important segment of potential saving. The present work studies the monitoring of the compressed air used for blow moulding of a packaging solution company. The study addresses the monitoring of compressed air line in term of operational and energy variables. The available measured data are used to evaluate the energy performance evolution during a year time. The work tackles the problem with two different approaches based on univariate and multivariate methods. The first method aims at finding a key performance index and a new univariate control chart related to energy/operational parameters to better monitor the performance of the compressed air plant. Besides, the multivariate analysis of the production process is applied in order to analyse the energy efficiency by also considering the multiple variables influencing the whole process itself. Final purposes are identify a new methodology for the production process analysis and evaluate flaws and strengths of these models.