Digitalization Use Case: Airport Carousel

With my doctoral studies, one asset that was analyzed in further detail was carousels. The questions I got from other students was how many such carousels are there worldwide. How can I answer this question? I made it as simple as possible. 1985 airports have an IATA code. Major HUB airports have over 50 carousels and regional at least one. Maybe the assumption is wrong is we say that the average is 10 carousels per listed airport and these rough figure would make it around 20.000 worldwide. One thing is clear, if maintenance is done poorly, downtime will increase over time. With evidence in other industries, predictive maintenance is the proven strategy that significantly reduces downtime but the problem is that it requires data. 

That said: Your opinion is appreciated and thanks for leaving a comment.

Carousels are known to be robust. However, they are tasked every day and wear even when occurring slowly cannot be avoided. Some organizations operate them, without any maintenance and they fix them when they break. Other organizations follow a plan and overhaul them annually.  

Important for such carousels is that the chain tension is adjusted as specified. If not wear-and-tear can be higher than usual. Worst case, over tensioned chains, break.

Another reported issue is caused by objects that find their way between the overlapping slats onto the track. Worst case this is a hard metal item that gets pushed in front of a wheel for many months. Damage on the track can be fatal and I have inspected one carousel in the UK where the track became as thin as paper and collapsed during operation.

Further, it seems that adjusting the chain tension is not as easy as described in the manufacturers manual. Connecting a spring scale and pulling and reading the force often end up in guesswork and heavily over tensioned chains. The risk that such a over tensioned chain brakes is high.

Another problem is friction drive adjustment. For redundancy purposes, there are typically more than one motors driving the carousel. Adjusting them perfectly, so that the friction is set at its best is challenging.

The biggest problem is that situation that cause wear are not recognized instantly as the moving parts are underneath heavy cladding or behind stainless steel build to fulfil the noise level restrictions.

It would just need a handful of sensors and a data processing unit and an advanced algorithm and such carousels can be monitored. Asked about if this is not expensive the answer can be given by O&M organizations easily. How much effort is required for surveys as these costs could be reduced significantly? Further, check the repair cost in case something fatal happened.

A monitoring system has typically an ROI of less than 5 years but this depends on the efforts your organization took to keep the carousels operational.

Based on feedback there is now a system available that monitors the condition of carousels reliably and 24/7.

It would be interesting to get feedback here if more efficient maintenance is of interest.

Further, let me know if there is failure or measurements that are of interest but not listed on the intro page figure. If you know an organization that faced carousel downtime it would be good to share this article with them.

Thanks