INTERVIEW WITH FEELIT

Feelit™ develops and provides unique sensing solutions enabling real-time insights, empowering manufacturers to transform the way they manage their critical assets.

The company enables users to improve uptime, as well as reducing asset cost of ownership, and safety risks.

Feelit™ has developed a patented ink-based sensing technology, combining a printed nanotechnology sticker sensor and a wireless edge device, that can detect parameter changes and predict upcoming failures in industrial and process systems.

Due to the ultra-thin, flexible and adaptable configuration of the stickers, they can easily be applied to any surface.

Feelit’s innovative sensing solutions offers real-time alerts to protect business and manufacturing processes. The patented end-to-end agile, sensing and analytics solutions can be deployed and scaled across a diversity of industrial equipment and industrial sectors.

Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?

FEELIT: Feelit™ is active in predictive maintenance for the industrial manufacturing and process based sectors.

For users who need to optimize their maintenance operations and costs, minimize loss of resources, and improve safety, Feelit’s unique sensing solutions enable condition based and predictive maintenance.

Predictive maintenance provides value to the industry, by increasing uptime, reducing costs and reducing risks relating to safety, health and environment.

Asset monitoring has always been a cornerstone of any maintenance operation, but data collection and storage was both expensive and time consuming. The advent of the digital revolution which incude big data solutions and IoT drove a paradigm shift in that AI and ML (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) can make sense of the very large amount of data being produced and can be used to drive value in offerings such as PdM (Predictive Maintenance).

Feelit™ provides each sector with the specific predictive maintenance solutions required according to its manufacturing processes.

Feelit™ gears specific solutions for the Oil and Gas Industry, delivering monitoring solutions for pressure relief and critical valves along with steam trap and flange leakage. Both Upstream and Downstream solutions are provided and monitored parameters include; temperature monitoring with detection of thermal patterns, abnormal pressure events, and wall thickness where corrosion or abrasion may cause wall thinning which would increase surface strains by pressure changes.

Predictive maintenance solutions for the highly regulated Food and Beverage and Pharma industries include monitoring control valves as well as steam trap leakage along the manufacturing process. Pipes are also monitored for corrosion and abrasion due to potentially erosive substances flowing through them.

The Chemical industry requires solutions for Pressure Relief and control valves along with steam trap leakage and flanges, as well as monitoring in real time for corrosion and abrasion throughout the piping system.

In addition, Feelit provides solutions to many manufacturing industries based on their specific processes and requirements.

E.E: What are the ranges of products?

FEELIT: Feelit™ turns a standard asset into a smart asset for predictive maintenance, alerting manufacturers of upcoming failures in real-time, reducing downtime in the manufacturing process and delivering more value to customers. The Solution delivers proprietary data analytics which can easily integrate into current UI and IoT systems with a quick ROI.

The entire piping systems in process based and manufacturing facilities include pipes, valves, flanges, traps, and many other elements. Piping is a significant threat to plant safety due to the very large number of joints that are spread over the entire facility.

By placing sensors and collecting data at each critical junction, Feelit™ enables ongoing and uninterrupted process manufacturing, decreasing downtime and saving financial and human resources.

The Feelit solution combines a unique sensor, and proprietary data analytics, to provide a total predictive maintenance solution geared specifically for the user’s assets and environment.

Feelit’s sensors can be applied to any surface as well as hard to reach places due to its thinness and flexibility as well as the ability to withstand extremely rugged environments.

The Sensors can be applied to pipes, steam traps, valves and flanges, constantly monitoring, and alerting in real time as to any breach of pre-set parameters. Parameters monitored range from pressure patterns, temperature and pipe wall integrity to leakage.

The Feelit™ Analytics portion of the solution is a cloud-based software platform based on proprietary AI (artificial intelligence) driven algorithms developed to provide customers with the specific data and insights needed to more optimally manage and maintain their industrial and manufacturing processes. Feelit’s AI combines the entire set of parameters from all sensors and compares them to predictive models, exploiting data from previous deployment scenarios to extrapolate where and when a malfunction will occur, and whether maintenance is required or not.

The software is unique in that Feelit™ understands the actual physicality of the asset being monitored, so that the analytics are specific to the asset and identification of the problem.  As a result, the insights provided are actionable and relevant.

This analytics package is very easily integrated into customers’ current UI and IoT systems. The ease of integration enables customer maintenance and operations teams to more quickly utilize the data from the sensors on the factory floor, as it is seamlessly integrated into their current UI and IoT and can be displayed on the customer’s current dashboard. Feelit’s analytics suite is agnostic to the Customer’s internal system and can be backward compatible to any legacy system via an API.

E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active? What can you tell us about market trends?

FEELIT: Feelit operates in the Predictive Maintenance market sector.

Improved asset management is needed across all manufacturing and process-based industries. AI and ML solution providers can collect and turn the vast amount of customer-related data into meaningful and actionable insights, as IoT generates a huge amount of data from all the connected devices throughout the facility.

Predictive maintenance enables enterprises to make operational predictions up to 20 times faster and more accurately than with traditional systems. In industrial and process manufacturing, unplanned downtime arising from equipment breakdown costs money. Predictive maintenance-based solutions help enterprises identify patterns in constant streams of data to predict equipment failure before it happens, saving time and money.

The major growth drivers of the predictive maintenance market include the increasing adoption of emerging technologies which provide valuable insights, and the growing need to reduce maintenance cost and downtime.

Real-time analytics technology is one of these growth drivers of the predictive maintenance market. The technology provides analytical calculations of real-time data streamed from the many applications, sensors and devices on the manufacturing plant floor, enabling quick and appropriate time-sensitive information. This is critical to predictive maintenance as it provides real-time automated data in order to maintain asset health.

The adoption of cloud-based predictive maintenance solutions is growing, due to their many benefits, such as easy maintenance of generated data, cost-effectiveness and scalability.

There is a high demand for predictive maintenance in process and manufacturing industries such as Oil and Gas, Power and Energy, Food and Beverage, Pharmacueticals and Chemical Plants where many different machines and assets work together. Predictive maintenance helps in optimizing the production process by reducing the costs and time involved in the maintenance process.

The growth of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and Data Analytics have helped drive the predictive maintenance market towards complete automation, offering increased efficiency and accuracy.

The need to determine actionable insights from the data gathered, enable faster resolution of problems, along with increased efficiency and a decrease in operation and maintenance costs and asset downtime, are the factors driving the growth of the predictive maintenance market.

E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?

FEELIT: Feelit”s end to end solution works differently than other solutions on the market.  Feelit’s patented sticker sensors are very small and very thin, and attach to an industrial asset in a completely non-intrusive manner.  These sensors monitor the asset’s status with zero downtime for installation and along with Feelit’s proprietary analytics, enable condition based monitoring and predictive maintenance of process based manufacturing assets.