When you’re in charge of operations at a large brewery and realize that your team is spending too much time on instrument calibrations, using processes that are potentially hazardous, who do you call?
One major brewing facility in the United States recently faced this challenge. With close to 100 RTD thermometers installed at the plant, the manual calibration process had become time consuming, taking up nearly 80 hours of labor each year.
The brewery had been using a combination of portable micro-baths and other calibrators to perform calibrations on its RTD thermometers. The micro-bath calibrations involve the use of hot oil and an ITS-90 traceable reference thermometer. Each time the micro-bath was moved to a new location, the oil needed to be heated to the appropriate temperature and allowed to stabilize prior to performing the actual single point calibration.
Consequently, this process was taking the tech team around 45 minutes on average to calibrate each thermometer. Performing calibrations using the portable hot oil micro-baths also was creating safety concerns and challenges, as transporting a micro-bath containing hot oil from sensor to sensor had the potential to become a serious safety hazard if not done properly and carefully.
“Calibration is a very intimate process,” says Robert Jennings, calibration and repair manager at Endress+Hauser. “Technicians have to stop production, so there’s no money being made, and they also have to take instruments offline. There could be a lot of risk involved, not just with the device being calibrated, but then getting production back online successfully.”
The brewery’s lead instrumentation specialist was challenged to fix the situation. He was assigned to lead a project that would identify a safer and more efficient method of performing calibrations on its fleet of RTD thermometers.
“You can imagine the quantity of instrumentation needing to be calibrated,” adds Jennings. “You have to be able to work fast, efficiently and effectively. And then from there, you have to get back online.”
The project lead made a quick decision to purchase an Endress+Hauser’s iTHERM TrustSens hygienic thermometer, the world’s first self-calibrating thermometer, to see if it would save time and reduce risk and cost.
A self-calibrating solution
Endress+Hauser’s iTHERM TrustSens thermometer is designed to maximize product safety, plant availability and process efficiency. In particular, the TrustSens thermometer has a high-precision reference built into the temperature sensor which aides in the calibration process. Its automated and fully traceable inline self-calibrations reduce process downtime, helping to minimize risk and costs.
Nathan Hedrick, national product manager at Endress+Hauser, explains why automated calibration capabilities are critical in modern plants: “Assume you’ve got stable measurements that are unlikely to drift. When the schedule indicates that it is time to manually calibrate the instrument, you may be arbitrarily taking it out of calibration, inducing unnecessary cost and downtime, and increasing the risk of damage to a device that is working perfectly fine. Instruments that are self-calibrating in place enable you to achieve more frequent calibrations that are automatically triggered by pre-set deviations.”
