Grant: Alliance Grants

Industrial bearing and power transmission component distributors are the direct contact of industrial clients in need of components and services related to industrial machine maintenance and retrofit, or in emergencies when machine breakdowns occur. Their experience provides invaluable insight that ensures machine uptime and maximum profit for their industrial clients. However, traditional service models that these distributors rely on are quickly being upended by intelligent machine condition monitoring technology, which is on the cusp of revolutionizing the way maintenance engineers ensure the uptime of their equipment. Unfortunately, this technology is currently only viable for the largest of companies.General Bearing Service (GBS), in partnership with the Advanced Dynamics Design Lab (ADDL) at the University of Ottawa intends to bring the latest advances in intelligent machine condition monitoring to Canadian small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) that rely on GBS to help them ensure a consistent and predictable production cash flow. To do so, GBS intends to offer AI-based machine condition monitoring systems to clients and provide maintenance contracts that guarantee uptime and improved process efficiency. To achieve this, the ADDL and GBS have worked closely to develop and launch openPHM.org, an open-access web app for collecting data with a prototype multi-sensor IoT device and providing machine health status updates with a machine learning algorithm. For this second phase, the technology will be field-tested in industry and further developed based on the results.This partnership will provide GBS with the required technological resources and expertise to modernize the industry and provide the much-needed value-added services required by its clients to remain competitive. This partnership will also provide the ADDL with in-depth insight into the industry required to advance research in this field of study, test innovative solutions, and train highly qualified personnel.