North Vancouver, BC. At one of the largest bulk export terminals in Canada, dawn breaks with dust rising in a haze after coal is dumped from rail cars by rotating them upside down. The bulk shipping terminal is a flurry of activity with rail car dumpers, stacker reclaimers, conveyors, ship loaders, and movement of boats transporting over 35 million tons of coal and potash each year from Canada to world markets. Contributing 6-8 percent to Canada’s GDP, this operation is supercritical for the mining companies and Canadian economy it supports. Downtime on key equipment at inopportune times leads to staggering costs amounting to multiple millions of dollars per hour in lost revenue. The railcar unloaders, ship loaders, and stacker reclaimers are very expensive monster machines where equipment availability is imperative to maximizing revenue for ports and terminals. For these operations like other manufacturers, the crucial questions looming large is how to prevent catastrophic downtime due to major equipment failure and increase productivity to achieve new levels of process efficiency.

Helping ports and terminals, industrial manufacturers, and municipalities find answers to these extremely vital questions is QCA Systems, a provider of electrical engineering, industrial automation, consulting, and system integration solutions. The company is a specialty engineering firm with decades of expertise in bulk material handling, collision avoidance, database and reporting, motion controls and robotics, among others, coupled with 24/7-hour support.

QCA is a Rockwell Automation global Solution Provider for ports and terminals, specializing in bulk material handling machinery and operations where project results are ensured through ownership of complete electrical, instrumentation and control scopes. The company is a PTC partner who leverages industry expertise to create predictive maintenance models to prevent equipment failures, increasing port productivity. “While most manufacturing sites have had data historians collecting a goldmine of production data for years, gaining actionable insight from these databases has historically been time difficult and time consuming,” points out Craig Pearce, Director of Sales and Marketing at QCA Systems.

To unlock process efficiencies from this data, QCA leverages PTC ThingWorx, a technology platform designed for the industrial internet of things (IIoT), capable of juxtaposing historical data models against a site’s live data streams to create advance warning systems based on anomaly detection. The company uses data historian asset frameworks combined with ThingWorx to model key equipment and extrapolate historical performance into the future, identifying possible anomalies with confidence. “With the increased production needs of our clients and the workforce challenges they face, the technology stack we built is key to unlocking information from their datasets that supports better maintenance practices and scaling of their businesses,” explains Pearce.

Keeping Major Equipment Up and Running

Typical bulk terminals have four major machine types—rail car dumpers/unloaders, stacker reclaimers, ship loaders and large conveyor systems connecting them together.

These are complex systems with multiple material paths, where each asset affects productivity of others and the overall site. A typical scenario comprises coal transported via railcar being dumped onto a conveyor for transport directly to a boat or into the stockyard. Reclaiming product from the stockyard requires the stacker-reclaimer machine to slew along tracks picking up appropriate coal grade for the customer’s order. Mixing this up can be financially catastrophic and create adverse impacts on machinery. “Stacker reclaimers are huge $50 million machines that can move more than 10,000 tons per hour of product. With better vision and information systems we are solving multiple issues with these machines for our terminal clients,” says Pearce. For example, the bucket wheel scooping product rotates on a wheel bearing, the failure of which resulting in downtime that can amount $20 million+ in expenses and lost revenue. “With these systems we are able to provide spatial awareness preventing adverse impacts to machinery and also predict when the bucket wheel bearing may fail.” Typically, the machine operator is guided by cameras to scoop the material from the pile. However, less experienced operators are not always good at smoothly positioning the machine and often collide with piles, creating mechanical stress on the equipment, and contributing to bearing or other mechanical failures.

To prevent this, QCA installs sensors on the equipment that create 3D point cloud models of the stockyard. This and other key equipment parameters from the machine controller are sent to ThingWorx for digital twin modelling. As the machine moves, it scans piles and updates models, which can be used for collision avoidance between machines, bulldozers, people, etc. while softening operator movement of the machine not to negatively impact design life. This also optimizes machine movement to reclaim more material. “With this improved vision, control and ThingWorx modeling we can prevent and predict equipment issues giving operations increased throughput and maintenance the advanced warning they need to repair or replace key components prior to catastrophic failure,” states Pearce.

What differentiates QCA from others on the market is they are an engineering and systems integration company with decades of ports and terminals experience building machinery and supporting operations at multiple sites. Their boots-on-the-ground knowledge and expertise is key to unlocking value from these projects. “Instead of simply relying on software and analysis expertise,” Pearce asserts, “We understand both the operations and maintenance environments and equipment producing the data, which allows proper data context to be applied at a low level, which makes our models more accurate and allows us to target use cases the industry benefits most from.”

QCA Systems is also working extensively with FactoryTalk systems from Rockwell Automation and others on historical data collection, visualization, enhanced operator interfaces, shipload planning optimization and routing systems. “We can track products from the mine pit all the way through to the boat at port to verify the right amount of correct product arrives in the right place,” says Pearce.

In addition to leveraging advanced analytics using ThingWorx, the firm is building a technology stack and methodology that can be standardized and expanded to use cases across industry. “Our goal is to take the solutions we’ve developed in Vancouver to customers across the globe, to solve similar problems faced by every port and terminal facility globally,” concludes Pearce on a buoyant note.