Rotating equipment
Pumps, fans, compressors, turbines and gearboxes monitored with fused vibration and acoustic signals, alongside the monitoring system you already run.
Industry
Process industries and rotating machinery: steel, cement, chemicals, paper, mining
Specialist acoustic diagnostics alongside the monitoring you already run, where downtime is priced per hour.
The situation
What plants in this sector tell us
- A vibration system that covers the standard assets and goes quiet on the difficult ones.
- Intermittent faults that never appear during a scheduled route measurement.
- Alerts the shift team learned to dismiss, and nobody willing to say so out loud.
- Hostile acoustics: plant noise, variable load, and sensors that cannot be mounted where the physics wants them.
Most continuous plants already have a vibration monitoring system and a vendor behind it. We are not a replacement for it. We are the specialists you call for the assets it cannot explain: acoustically hostile areas, intermittent faults, kilns and mills, and any AI system whose alerts the plant has stopped trusting and wants evaluated independently. We design sensing setups robust to plant noise, run inference at the asset and keep everything on-premise. The same asset knowledge transfers between a steel plant, a cement line and a paper mill, whichever country they stand in. Explosion-protected zones in chemical, oil and gas plants require certified sensor hardware; ask us.
Where we help
Where our methods apply
Site acoustic surveillance
As an add-on to a monitoring project: edge devices that flag impacts, leaks, arcing and abnormal machine states across the plant and raise alerts.
Electrical distribution
Partial discharge and transformer monitoring for the plant's own substations.
Kilns, mills and crushers
Acoustic signatures of load, wear and abnormal operation.
EvidenceProject experience with turbines, motors, generators and gearboxes in German industry; industrial sound analysis and microphone-placement work; partial discharge research (INTER-NOISE 2021, see the Power sector page). Context: the US Department of Energy puts predictive maintenance at 35 to 45 percent less downtime and 25 to 30 percent lower maintenance cost (FEMP O&M Best Practices Guide).
By asset
The machines we listen to in this sector
Bearings and gearboxes
Wear, lubrication loss and race defects from vibration and airborne acoustics; on-node classification for fleets.
Motors, generators and e-drives
In service: bearing, rotor and mechanical faults from vibration and sound, fused with drive or PLC data. At the end of the line: acoustic pass/fail testing of new motors, e-axles, gearboxes and compressors with learned limits instead of fixed thresholds.
Turbines, fans and compressors
Load, imbalance and abnormal operation from acoustic and vibration signatures.
Pumps and valves
Cavitation, dry running and leakage from ultrasound and vibration.
Switchgear, bushings and terminations
Partial discharge at switchgear, bushings and terminations detected without contact; oil-filled transformer tanks and tap-changers with contact sensors instead.
Extruders and continuous lines
Process state and quality drift tracked acoustically.
The whole site
Acoustic surveillance on edge devices: impacts, leaks, arcing and unusual events flagged to the maintenance system. Offered as an add-on to a monitoring project, not as a first step.
How we would start
The services this sector uses most
Almost every engagement begins with a feasibility study or a discovery call, because the cheapest thing to establish first is whether the signature is there at all.
Expert consultation & advisorySenior engineering time, by the day or on retainer.Open service page Feasibility studyFixed scope, fixed fee, honest go / no-go.Open service page Multi-modal sensing + edge AIRuggedised sensor units and on-device AI.Open service page Sovereign AI & federated learningOn-premise AI and federated learning across plants.Open service page
Start here
Discuss a project in Process industries
Tell us the asset or the station, what goes wrong and how often. We answer every enquiry within 48 hours on working days.
- Your data stays on site; on-premise and on-device deployment is the default
- We work alongside the monitoring system you already run
- Honest go / no-go before any large spend
Ready to find out if it works on your machines?
Start with a free 30 to 45 minute discovery call. Bring the problem, the recordings you already have and your questions. We will tell you honestly whether sensing-based AI is the right tool and what the next step would cost in days, not months.