Zirocco

Road and airport marking companies have traditionally used propane dryers to ensure dry surfaces before applying line marking and crack sealing. This solution is both slow and requiring heavy equipment. In response, Zirocco developed a new product. Its self-contained Zirocco road dryer — a microturbine with 450 °C outlet and 50-100 sqm/min air — uses gas turbine technology, an alternative to propane much smaller yet much faster and more effective than typical road dryers. Microjet turbines are susceptible. They require monitoring and service after every 100 hours of operation. Zirocco needed to control and monitor their turbines to ensure their performance and plan preventive maintenance with their clients globally. To do that, they knew they needed to integrate a sophisticated telematics solution into their machines.

Zirocco clients need to operate and run the road dryer whenever the weather conditions require drying before applying line marking and sealing. The Zirocco road dryers' serviceability is critical for minimizing the downtime of the roads and runways due to construction work. The road and runway environment is very demanding for jet turbines. Any lack of serviceability will also result in high costs and waiting time for the high amount of equipment and resources used to apply lines and sealing.

An unserviceable road dryer's bottleneck effect is mitigated by constant monitoring of multiple sensors in each unit to prevent breakdown and in-time replacement. A Danfoss PLUS+1 Controller and CANlink mobile device work together to control and monitor these machines. Zirocco and their clients have an overview of the performance of each unit. They are alerted when the parameters are out of scope and ahead of the completion of the 100 service hours, enabling Zirocco to either contact the clients for active measures and send a replacement before a breakdown occurs. Direct integration into the PLUS+1 service tool gives Zirocco and the service department the ability to monitor and change all machine parameters from anywhere via remote service access. The telematics solution tracks and helps protect machines with GPS, anti-theft monitoring, and Geofencing capabilities. Its automatic report generation functionality even enables operators to document their work.

With Proemion telematics, Zirocco can drive productivity for manufacturing, service, and operators. The plug and perform solution is easy to install on each machine. The most significant benefit to Zirocco is that it can diagnose and resolve problems with turbines remotely. Service can also precisely anticipate maintenance needs to keep equipment performing optimally, decreasing issues and machine downtime.

The manufacturer now resolves approximately 20% of cases remotely with the collected CAN data's help, saving travel time and costs. In 70% of cases, they can diagnose the root cause of an issue and define whether it is a problem caused by lack of maintenance or machine mishandling. Also, Zirocco machine owners and resellers can use remote diagnostics to resolve issues independently.

Proemion reports enable Zirocco management to run utilization reports showing hours per day, month, or task. They can also analyze the current state of a machine by reviewing machine data over time. More granular information, such as the number of machine starts, helps Zirocco ensure that a road dryer has adequate fuel and is in top operating condition.