Alterra Energy selects Shoreline APM For Predictive Maintenance

Shoreline AI helps Alterra Energy to continuously monitor the machine health using their Plug-N-Play APM Solution

Customer Background

Alterra is a leader in the future of advanced recycling. The company helps solve global plastic pollution with its unique recycle technology. It converts waste plastic into petrochemicals that are used to manufacture new plastic. This innovation converts a wide spectrum of plastic feedstock into valuable new resources, including harder to process plastics other companies find challenging.

The company uses a variety of machines, including electric motors, gearboxes, extruders, pumps, blowers, fans, conveyers, presses, balers, HPUs and chillers. They deployed Shoreline AI’s solution across a variety of assets to gain real-time visibility into machine performance and prevent downtime, scrap and reduced productivity.

Customer’s assets being monitored by Shoreline AI

Challenges with the existing process

To continue pushing the boundaries for converting challenging plastic feedstock, Alterra needs to ensure the process parameters are optimized to produce the desired product yield.

Reactors, where the chemical reactions take place, are the “heart & soul” of the process. Real-time visibility into the status of critical ancillary equipment was not available.

Assets were maintained manually, making it more difficult to detect an operational trend going down, perpetuating a reactive mindset.

Customer Testimonial

“Shoreline’s cost effective and user-friendly asset performance management solution provides the leading indicators required for equipment to run efficiently and reliably. It empowered our team to make a cultural shift from a reactive to a proactive mindset. We now have another tool to prevent unexpected failures, which further allows us the ability to continually optimize our process.”

– Bobby VerBrugge, Director of Operations – Alterra Energy

Shoreline AI's Solution using Shoreline APM

The Shoreline solution not only automated continual monitoring of asset health, its predictive analytics diagnostic suite provided advance warning of equipment failure with real-time fault detection, issue diagnosis and recommended repair.

Data ingestion and processing into Shoreline’s AWS environment consists of several AWS services that include AWS IoT Core which handles device authentication/authorization, data encryption. IoT core triggers AWS Lambda for processing. Structured data is stored in Amazon Aurora while unstructured data and asset manuals in stored in Amazon S3.  Shoreline also leverages Amazon SageMaker for training its ML models and Amazon Bedrock LLM Models for Gen AI. This combination of ML models with physics-based models enable auto-configuration of assets from Shoreline’s proprietary pre-built library of more than 30,000 assets. Initial machine baselines established from the auto-configuration process provides insights in days, not months.

Shoreline AI’s Anomaly Detection with adept Vibration Analysis

Vibration Analysis With Narrowband Identifies Operating Anomolies.

Results

Provides the actionable knowledge to address asset issues before they become problems, enabling optimized performance to extend their useful life.
The maintenance and technical teams have additional data to further bolster our safe, reliable and efficient operation on the most critical asset in our fleet. They can now do more with less.

About Shoreline AI

Shoreline AI’s plug-and-play asset performance management delivers breakthrough simplicity and cost efficiency. Completely self-installed by non-experts, smart sensors automatically connect to the cloud and are auto-provisioned via a rich library of 30,000+ pre-built asset physics models. 

This cloud-native approach requires no new CapEx, on-site experts or data scientists, operationalizing in days and delivering powerful machine-specific analytics. This highly secure, 100% APM subscription approach creates unprecedented industrial economics and scales easily for new applications such as emissions monitoring. 

Shoreline AI helps clients in asset-intensive industries maximize the performance and profitability of their operations, create a proactive and predictive maintenance approach to asset management, and accelerate sustainability initiatives. The company’s solutions are designed for machinery serving the energy, manufacturing, pharma and data-center cooling industries.