Developing Microfluidic Lab-on-a-chip Technology Demonstrator for Onsite Lubricating Oil Analysis

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The automation of industrial practices to enable greater productivity on production floors is driving the need to replace conventional processes. One of such processes is the use of conventional laboratories to determine the rate of wear and degradation of lubricated production floor machinery. The inefficiency of this process results in reactive maintenance strategies where machinery is maintained only after it has broken-down thus reducing machine availability and productivity. Another is carrying out maintenance when there is no need for this as is the case with preventative maintenance strategies, making maintenance of machinery unnecessarily expensive. Diagnosing early, potential failure of heavy machinery is critical to operations across many industries. For this reason, industrial businesses in 2016 spent £2.01bn on state-of-the-art Oil Condition Monitoring (OCM) techniques. These techniques however, are inefficient, expensive and environmentally unfriendly, for example, costing additional £2.1bn in breakdowns, repairs and downtime losses. RAB-Microfluidics has developed cutting edge microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technology to deliver real-time continuous testing and analysis of lubricating oil. Our "Lab-on-a-Chip" technology delivers oil analysis 1000x faster and 10x cheaper than the current "send the sample to the Laboratory" approach. Analysis of contaminants in engine oil, drive trains etc. is a well-established method of detecting problems. This procedure is called Oil Condition Monitoring. We deliver this onsite, in real time, saving cost and improving equipment reliability. We combine our hardware technology with data computing by developing machine learning capabilities to utilise the data generated from our hardware. This offers customers real-time continuous monitoring, early problem diagnosis, rapid decision making, enhanced efficiency and cost savings. To date we have received various levels of funding to demonstrate the technology with laboratory based prototypes. Nonetheless, this project seeks to build on this and develop a field demonstrator to engage businesses in the manufacturing space in field trials and in the reality of the value our technology can provide. This technology will enable us to solve the hard-to-reach and hard-to-sense challenges of many business in the manufacturing space, using the data we generate intelligently and innovatively to forward model machinery behaviour and immerse businesses in industry 4.0\. We advance evolution of maintenance strategies to secure equipment reliability, increase Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) and by extension productivity on production floors. We extend our capabilities to other industries such as transportation, power generation, maritime etc. helping to transition businesses in these industries to predictive maintenance strategies.