Industrial workers are exposed to various hazardous conditions. Harmful radiation, extreme temperatures and low air quality, to name a few. In the United States, private industries report nearly 2.8 million nonfatal workplace accidents and injuries annually. A study shows that fatal workplace injuries affect 25 percent of construction workers in the construction industry.
Sudden failures of heavy equipment can also cause injuries. Most equipment-related accidents are either hard to predict or pinpoint.
Workplace accidents result in irreparable damage to people or assets and are sometimes fatal. They often lead to costly litigations as well. Employers may have to compensate injured workers for up to 500 weeks.
Traditional operational technologies (OT) have limited scope in improving industrial safety. However, as more companies in manufacturing, mining, refineries and other industries are adopting the Internet of Things (IoT), new possibilities to improve industrial safety are opening up.
Six IoT Applications to Improve Industrial Safety
Industrial IoT harnesses the power of data collected from a vast array of network-connected sensors. IoT data can be monitored and analyzed to provide insights into machine health, operational workflows and environmental conditions. Leveraging these insights, companies can enhance their industrial processes with intelligence and automation, making them safer and more reliable.
1. Environmental Monitoring
IoT solutions monitoring and analyzing environmental sensor data can alert operators and workers about impending hazards. These sensors are installed in IoT edge devices like sensors, actuators and other endpoints.
The environmental sensor data is vital for safety and must be designed to ensure data integrity. For example, TTI’s environmental sensors pack robust sensing and wireless functionality into an ultra-small footprint. These sensors can track eight environmental factors – temperature, humidity, light, UV index, barometric pressure, noise, acceleration and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
2. Predictive Maintenance
IoT predictive maintenance (PdM) involves processes like condition-based monitoring, machine learning and analytics to predict potential machine failures. In addition to reducing downtime, PdM is critical to avoid hazards due to sudden equipment failures.
In mining and oil and gas companies, workers have to face hazardous conditions to inspect and diagnose problems in production equipment. Chevron addressed this by installing sensors across its pipelines to measure pH, gaseous and aqueous CO2/H2S content and the pipeline's internal diameter and thickness. Using a cloud-based IoT PdM solution, Chevron analyzed sensor data to reliably predict corrosion and pipeline damages, reducing the risks of unplanned shutdowns and personnel hazards.
3. Automated Failsafe
In highly time-sensitive use cases like in nuclear plants or airplanes, simply generating alerts could be insufficient. Even a momentary lapse in human response could have catastrophic consequences. Such cases require instantaneous decisions without human intervention.
IoT enables machine-to-machine (M2M) communication at a large scale, where devices communicate with each other directly. M2M allows automated triggers to be preset in IoT systems to mitigate anomalies without operator intervention. So, if there’s an alert due to the abnormal functioning of a machine, it can be shut down immediately, and its workloads automatically and instantly rerouted to other components without causing disruption.
4. Smart Fleet Management
Drivers and other transport staff spend countless hours on roads exposing themselves to traffic accident-related injuries. Truck operators also face constant risks of fuel thefts, in-transit property damages from roadside threats, reckless driving, breakdowns due to suboptimal preventive maintenance and vehicle warranty issues.
IoT ushered in several communication technologies like narrowband-IoT (NB-IoT), LoraWAN and long-range low-power transmissions, which along with 4G/5G cellular communication enable remote monitoring of fleets in transit and remote locations. By tracking vehicle movement and driver condition in real-time, operators can act on alerts promptly, reducing the risks of accidents, breakdowns and other road-side damages while improving overall efficiency and productivity.
5. Autonomous Carriers and Drones
IoT combines the power of data connectivity with artificial intelligence and machine learning. The outcome is autonomous equipment, and its most remarkable specimens from a safety perspective are drones. Drones are aerial IoT edge devices with a small footprint that collect sensor data and transmit those for processing and analytics. Drones replace human workers to improve safety in hazardous work conditions, such as exposure to harmful radiation and toxic substances.
After the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster, drones collected information from the plant’s sites with high radiation levels. Drones can also significantly reduce safety risks in disaster response where the responders face unsafe and unknown conditions.
6. Wearables
Wearables are vital IoT gadgets that human workers can wear (examples: smartwatches and health monitors). Wearables collect vital data directly from the workers’ bodies and provide valuable insights about their health and work patterns, opening up avenues for corrective actions to ensure safer work conditions.
Designing It Right
Industrial safety relies on failsafe IoT system design. To achieve this, reliable components are crucial. The components must be tamper-resistant. Forfeited components undermine the reliability of IoT systems. That’s why sourcing IoT components from trustworthy suppliers like TTI is critical.
Sravani Bhattacharjee has worked as a tech leader at Cisco, Honeywell and other companies where she delivered many successful innovations to the market. As the principal of Irecamedia, she collaborates with Industrial IoT innovators to create compelling vision, strategy and content that drives awareness and business decisions.
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