Howie Barber speaks with Denis Kouroussis about how continuous electrical monitoring and predictive analytics can help facility teams identify equipment issues before failures happen. They discuss waveform monitoring, predictive maintenance strategies and how data-driven insights can reduce downtime and improve operational reliability.
In this episode of Connected FM, host Howie Barber sits down with Denis Kouroussis to explore how continuous electrical monitoring and intelligent analytics are helping facility teams move beyond reactive maintenance.
They discuss the limitations of traditional preventative maintenance methods, the value of high-resolution waveform monitoring and how predictive insights can uncover hidden electrical and mechanical issues before equipment failures occur. Denis also shares a real-world case study involving a 750-ton hydraulic press where advanced monitoring identified the root cause of repeated motor failures, helping reduce downtime and avoid costly disruptions.
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Timestamps:
Denis Kouroussis: [00:00:00] The key here is to actually have a baseline of your operation and then to trend over time the delta of how, how much worse something is getting, a particular fault is getting.
So we've had scenarios where we have a contactor, for example, starting to fail on a big piece of equipment, and we've seen it go to almost catastrophic failure within a day.
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Today, host Howie Barber speaks with Dennis Karousis, CEO of Volta Insite, to [00:01:00] discuss how continuous electrical monitoring and intelligent analytics can help facility teams detect equipment issues before failures occur. They discuss the limitations of traditional preventative maintenance methods, the value of high-resolution waveform monitoring, and how data-driven insights can reduce downtime, improve reliability, and uncover hidden mechanical and electrical problems.
Now, let's get into it.
Howie Barber: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Connected FM. My name is Howie Barber. I am VP of Operations at Volta Insite, where we focus on helping you better understand your equipment health and operational reliability. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Dennis Kouroussas, CEO of Volta Insite and a respected leader in electrical systems and predictive maintenance, with a focus on how real-time data can be used to better understand system health, improve reliability, and extend the life of critical assets.
Dennis, [00:02:00] most facilities are dealing with equipment issues, maintenance cycles, and unexpected failures, but they often react to symptoms rather than identifying the signs ahead of time that could prevent downtime. When we talk about degradation, we're not just talking about power quality, we're talking about insulation breakdown, phase imbalance, mechanical stress showing up electrically, and other issues that traditional maintenance programs really can't see.
So if we start there, when you look at a facility, what are some of the early indicators that you can see or we can see that really don't show up when equipment seems to be running normally?
Denis Kouroussis: Well, thank you for that introduction. I don't think I've ever been called a respected leader before, Howie. So yes.
What typically happens in any facility, whether [00:03:00] it's a commercial facility or industrial, most people run equipment to failure.
And a way to address a lot of these issues is to have continuous monitoring with high resolution. So that's why we came up with the solution, and effectively it is a continuous oscilloscope style view of the entire facility with added intelligence on top of it. And how we do that is we are looking at waveforms continuously.
So we've come up with smart algorithms to be able to pick out what's important within those waveforms and then detect anomalies, and then interpret them to figure out what is starting to fail. So I'll give you a, a small example, and it's all in the voltage and current waveforms realistically. At your point of monitoring, if you have a voltage variation Typically, that's a consequence of something that's happening [00:04:00] upstream from your measurement point.
And if you-- if your voltage is solid, so you have very nice sinusoidal waveforms, but you see a current interruption happening, then that's something that's happening on your load side. So it's downstream from whatever equipment it is that you're measuring. One aspect is power quality, and that's the power coming in.
And to be able to determine is there issue at the utility level or within your distribution switchgear. And the other issue is, is your equipment running the way it's supposed to? Being able to see the actual current signatures of your operating equipment. So by having this continuous waveform capture throughout an entire facility, you can pinpoint anomalies very quickly, and it can help you mitigate the amount of downtime that you experience on a particular piece of equipment or in the whole process if you're in industrial manufacturing, [00:05:00] for example.
Howie Barber: So you're able to see an oscilloscope-style capture. What does a facility manager see?
Denis Kouroussis: You are able to go in and look at the waveforms and try to interpret them, and then go address the issues that are being identified.
Howie Barber: And why do you think traditional inspections fall short?
Like the, the daily-- How are they able to miss these things?
Denis Kouroussis: So you have things like thermal scanning or some type of monitoring, usually at the one-second resolution of RMS current, for example. There's a certain level of algorithmic development that you can put on top of that. The thermal scanning, the visual inspections, those are more preventative maintenance techniques rather than predictive.
On the predictive side, you actually keep a tally of everything that's been happening to that particular piece of equipment. And then based [00:06:00] on the actual electrical signatures, you can respond to very specific things within a piece of equipment. So for example, thermal, thermal scanning an induction motor from the outside, you might get some bearing information, but you're not gonna get anything internally on the stator or potentially with rotor bar degradation.
So it's a much more non-intrusive way of looking into the internals of the actual asset. One of the things that I've always had a problem with thermal scanning, 'cause I've done that as well in, in a past life, is that you open up a panel board and you shoot it, and you look for hotspots. You don't actually know if that piece of equipment's loaded in the moment So you're looking for, you know, thermal anomalies, but in that moment, the piece of equipment that you might be scanning [00:07:00] or the panel board and all its output branch circuits may have like 10% loading, which is not a very good test.
So not that these preventative maintenance techniques are not important, I think they are, but with a added level of intelligence, you can actually really get down to the root cause of particular
Howie Barber: issues. So I'm gonna switch gears just a little bit here, and I wanna ask you, do you have any stories where perhaps you were met with skepticism?
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Denis Kouroussis: Uh,
Howie Barber: a few. All
Denis Kouroussis: right. So this was many years ago. There was a hydraulic press which would take metal powder and turn it into car parts. Um, this was a 750-ton press that I actually got a call from the motor rebuild shop. So it was a 300-horsepower motor that had blown up two or three times, blown up the VFD as well.
And the motor rebuild shop was very concerned that they had done all this free work rewinding the motor to deploy in this hydraulic press, and that they would get a follow-up phone call to say that, "Oh, the motor blew up again. You guys didn't rewind it correctly." [00:09:00] So they called me in, and we went in with a whole bunch of equipment.
You know, I had oscilloscopes, I had some power quality meters, and so forth, and we started monitoring the motor when it was deployed. And what we saw was that under regular sort of operation in the early stages of that equipment, so for the first eight, nine hours, everything was fine, right? It was operating under normal conditions.
And then on the 14th or 15th hour, something started to change over time. And because it was a VFD system, the VFD was over-currenting the motor, so you can over-torque a motor for a certain period of time as long as you let it cool down. And so there was this sort of instantaneous cycle that was happening in that motor.
And what we noticed is to press out one part, [00:10:00] it took like seven seconds. So if you took the RMS current of that motor and you kinda averaged it out and you had that sort of high resolution, you could see that they were running right on the edge. They were running 100 and, I think it was 25% of full load current, um, if you average out the entire torque curve.
Um, which means that over a- 24 or 48-hour cycle, that motor will blow itself apart because it just does not have enough time to cool down. So we identified that problem. You know, there was a whole bunch of engineering involved. They slowed the process down to nine seconds, and everything started operating correctly.
The motor was w- within its thermal limits, and it kept going. So it was a big save for the company because each time this motor would self-destruct, they would have three, four days of [00:11:00] downtime, and that was-- and those were days where they could not deliver automotive parts. So that became invaluable. And, you know, there was a whole report written based on all these electrical signatures and so forth.
You know, it turns out even the manufacturer of the equipment did not believe the result. They thought it was the motor failing rather than, you know, their internal equipment. And after about six months of diagnostics internally, they found that there was inter- an internal hydraulic leak in the system that would get worse as the system would operate and get to temperature.
So being able to really look at the electrical signatures and have high resolution and understand them with a certain level of intelligence becomes invaluable in some of these, uh, critical pieces of equipment.
Howie Barber: So that's one example. So you described how it's a dramatic failure in 24 to 48 [00:12:00] hours.
Conversely, how early can you realistically detect slight degradation?
Denis Kouroussis: So that, that's, that's a great question. It can vary. It can vary on the speed of degradation of a particular piece of equipment. So you can get a month warning, you can get a day of warning or a week of warning. The key here is to actually have a baseline of your operation and then to trend over time the delta of how, how much worse something is getting, a particular fault is getting.
So we've had scenarios where we have a contactor, for example, starting to fail on a big piece of equipment, and we've seen it go to almost catastrophic failure within a day. And in other cases, we see it weeks and nothing is really changing, so that's good enough in that moment until we start seeing that delta start to increase significantly.[00:13:00]
Howie Barber: Okay. And when someone is thinking about making a change, going from their scheduled maintenance to bringing in a predictive program, what factors should they consider? And is there any point where you think it makes sense to stay with what they're doing? I mean, a lot of people will
Denis Kouroussis: say we have enough Um, but we have seen time and time again where we do deployments and we very quickly find problems within their facilities.
So, um, you know, the, I think the value is very significant.
Howie Barber: Dennis, what's one thing facility managers should start paying closer attention to?
Denis Kouroussis: I think every facility manager has experienced some level of electrical problems. Sometimes they'll have electricians come on site to try to diagnose, and they'll call them ghost electrical problems and so forth.
I say monitor first before you go spend a [00:14:00] significant amount of dollars on external diagnostics or even equipment swaps.
Howie Barber: And is there any one or two mistakes or blind parts where somebody doesn't notice that you see over and over repeatedly? I mean, there's, there's
Denis Kouroussis: a lot of opinions, I would say, from the electricians and tradespeople, and those opinions will influence an outcome that can be very costly.
So monitor before you do anything. Dennis, thank you for your time today. Thank you, Howie. It was a pleasure.
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