Internet of Things: Tirupur mills to be part of a unique experiment

CHENNAI: Thousands of energy readers will silently start to hum in spinning mills in one of the country’s largest textile hubs, Tirupur, in a project to leverage the Internet of Things concept to see if power consumed can be cut through real-time monitoring and analytics. For yarn spinners, nearly 40% of the cost of conversion from cotton to yarn is taken up by power expenses. Spinning mills in Tirupur have also run into rough weather with Indian exports appearing weak in the global market and Tamil Nadu trailing when compared to Gujarat and Andhra Pradesh in subsidising textile units.

For mills, power costs are a nightmare because the origin of problem lies in the malfunction of machinery. A dislodged belt, a wobbling pulley, or a worn out motor could result in more power being drawn without the problem being detected.

A mid-size textile mill in Tirupur will run 200-300 machines, meaning in production terms, a capacity of 30,000 spindles.

"We came to now it is possible to capture power data realtime, and from individual machines. The pilot will have meters fitted with wireless transmitters to every machine. All the data collated will be analysed and made available to us in the form of graphs," says Karthick Durai, managing director of Sowmya Mills.

A centralised software to sense of the voltage data can flag machines that guzzle, alerting the electrical engineer in charge through an SMS. Unattended, the message is escalated.

Elmeasure, which has bagged the contract to execute this system in 71 firms in Tirupur, has bagged 400 such contracts so far nationally. Textile units in Gujarat, which competes with Tamil Nadu is yarn spinning, have already seen the advent of Internet of Things in manufacturing. Big firms such as Reliance.