Rethinking the Power Industry

While we work towards making green energy more sustainable, how can we keep up with the increasing demand on our aging energy infrastructure?

Cutsforth, Inc., an innovative company challenging the traditional power generation industry, has developed an industrial-grade Internet-of-Things sensor system to monitor power generator health.

Cutsforth’s flagship product, the ‘EASYChange Brush Holder®’, allows consumable carbon brushes to be replaced ‘live’ while a generator is running. Carbon brushes provide essential electrical contact and current from the shaft to the generator, and over time these brushes wear down, needing to be replaced before they get dangerously short. Currently, this requires manual inspection and specialized instruments to measure key operating parameters which, if missed, can result in catastrophic consequences to the generator, including arcing, fires, offline generators, and no electricity flowing to the grid. Depending on the generator’s size, this can mean more than 200 carbon brushes to physically locate and inspect. Cutsforth identified the opportunity and approached Synapse for our expertise in IoT to help them leverage a sensor network and wireless communication to capture data and proactively feed it to the operations center.

Where will this lead in the future? For us at home, hopefully, more reliable electricity flowing to where we need it. For Cutsforth, transformation of their business from a components supplier to a company that can help their customers make data driven maintenance decisions — from an on-call service provider to potentially providing data-scheduled service contracts — continuing to push the envelope of what’s possible with intelligence, knowledge, and strong partnerships.

View the full case study here: https://www.synapse.com/projects/powe...