A cylinder break tells you what the cylinder did.
The cylinder sat in a tank, or on a rack somewhere near the bed. The element sat in a form with a different mass, a different surface area, and a different amount of heat going into it. Under winter conditions, with tarps down and steam running, those two can be a long way apart. Somebody still has to decide whether to strip.
Strip early and you risk the piece. Wait and you give up the turn, and bed turns drive the economics of a plant. The usual way to close that distance is a thermometer, a maturity chart, and experience.
EXACT Technology built a company around measuring that gap instead of estimating it. This month the Toronto-based firm joined PCI Illinois & Wisconsin as an associate member.
Match curing, and the point of it
Start with xMatch. It is a wireless match-curing system: a sensor reads the temperature inside the actual element, and the cylinder is held at that same temperature as it changes through the pour and the cure. The break then reflects the piece in the bed.
That matters because a release decision made on a match-cured cylinder is defensible. EXACT reports the system is in use at WJE Labs and at state DOTs for exactly that purpose, letting crews strip forms earlier on strength data they can hand to an inspector.
The rest of the line follows the same idea. xMonitor reads temperature, humidity, and maturity in real time so a piece stays inside spec while it is curing rather than being judged after the fact. xControl takes the next step and acts on the reading, running automated valve control for steam or direct-to-form electric heat so the curing curve follows a program instead of a schedule. xTrack handles the paperwork side, tying scheduling, QA/QC, and inventory together so the record of what happened to a given element lives in one place.
Photo courtesy of EXACT Technology.
Two things worth knowing about them
At CONEXPO-CON/AGG earlier this year, EXACT and Revolution | London debuted xBOLT for INSIGHT, an in-drum temperature sensor built directly into a mixer control system. The company describes it as the first of its kind, moving the measurement upstream from the bed to the drum.
The other proof point is less glamorous and probably more convincing. EXACT deployed xMonitor and its Relay hardware at the Allnorth propane export facility and other isolated coastal sites in North America, and reports full data integrity in conditions with no reliable connectivity and weather that punishes hardware. A curing bed inside a plant is a friendlier environment than that.
Who to call
Grayson Blevins covers the region for EXACT and is based in Chicago, inside driving distance of most plants in this chapter. His territory runs across thirteen states, from North Dakota to Kentucky.
He says the chapter is where he expects to keep current on regional DOT requirements and work directly with producers moving to digital workflows. That is a more useful reason to join than most, and it is the kind of thing that happens in a room rather than in a newsletter.
Reach Grayson at grayson.blevins@exacttechnology.com or 276-685-4303. The company is at exacttechnology.com and on LinkedIn.
Find EXACT Technology and every other associate in the associate member directory, or start with the producer directory if you are looking for a plant.
Photos courtesy of EXACT Technology. Company information, product details, and milestones provided by EXACT Technology.