Volta Knowledge: Recent Episodes
Volta Insite
Volta Knowledge is a podcast series that provides new ideas and thought leadership in Electrical Asset Health.
Every great company has an origin story. Denis Kouroussis, Founder & CEO of Volta Insite, joined Tyler Kern to talk about the factors that led to the creation of Volta Insite. But first, Kern wanted to learn a bit of Kouroussis’ personal origin story.
Kouroussis describes himself as a tech geek from birth. He also possesses a lifelong love of cars, which fueled an interest in engineering. “When I was thirteen, I opened up a fuel injection box,” Kouroussis said. “This was from an old Cadillac that my father used to have. It was the first throttle-body fuel injected system in the industry, and the car at the time was old, so he allowed me to play with it. I opened the ECU, and there were many chips, and I was like, this is fascinating. You’ve got electronics controlling an engine—I want to learn more.” And this led Kouroussis down the path of electrical engineering.
Volta started in 2009. Kouroussis saw the shifts in automotive manufacturing leaning towards electric vehicles as the potential for increased pressures on the grid. “We founded Volta specifically to address that problem through power management, or demand management,” Kouroussis said.
Although Kouroussis saw the forthcoming issues back in 2009, the investment world was slower to catch up. So, while Volta waited out the future, it began to tackle real-world manufacturing issues through consulting work fixing motor issues and other related production challenges. “Through the consulting, we came across this concept of electrical signal analysis, and that’s where Volta Insite was born.”
Volta takes its name from Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist, and pioneer of electricity and power. “Telsa Motors had come out, so I thought Volta would be an interesting sort of parallel company,” Kouroussis said. “Alessandro Volta was the first electrical engineer, in a sense, because he put the first battery pack together.”
A mechanical crisis is never something a business wants to deal with, yet it is probably something all businesses have experienced. George Galea, Vice President of Field Services for Volta Insite, joined Host Tyler Kern to discuss how automated monitoring of motors can alleviate the frantic rush for mechanical repairs.
Now more than ever, predictive maintenance is essential. Steel cost is up 100 percent, causing product prices to rise and shipping times to increase due to the supply chain disruption. Predictive maintenance of critical electrical assets tells a business when the assets will fail and helps identify which motors to stock and helps companies make the decision to buy spares ahead of time. “If you’re going to have any durability, any kind of maintenance of profits in the organization, is that you have to be able to predict when you’re going to have to service a certain asset,” stated Galea.
Many businesses think an automation system is adequate for maintenance. However, like the check engine light on a car, these systems are meant for control, not diagnosis and maintenance. On the other hand, the assay provides fine, granular control. It provides knowledge about when a motor needs to be replaced, the characteristics and operation, and can recommend if a certain application is wrong for a motor or asset. Galea explained, “With ESA, you really leverage your experience and the knowledge you have against anything that the market can throw at you. You are optimizing.”
Without data, you can’t make any informed decision. Volta provides data and makes it actionable to people by putting it in common terms and talking to clients to decrease financial burdens and crises from occurring.
For more information on automated motor monitoring, visit Volta’s website and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify or Apple iTunes.
Darcy Tangedal, a Reliability Specialist at Volta Insite, stopped by Volta Knowledge to provide insights on electric submersible pumps.
Tangedal said one of the main challenges with electric submersible pumps (ESPs) is that they don’t last long. “They operate somewhere between 450-800 degrees, and it’s a half a million dollars per install,” Tangedal said. “The pump/motor combination is two hundred and fifty to three hundred thousand dollars. And the install is worth about two hundred thousand dollars. They’re very expensive, and they use about seven days’ production installing them.”
With this type of investment, it’s critical to have an online monitoring system, like Volta’s, to predict failures. And when these types of systems shut down for maintenance, ESPs are known to fail. The problem is, according to Tangedal, operators don’t know which ESP is going to fail when they start back up. “But with the (Volta) Insight node, you’d have some great indications of which ones are close to failing,” Tangedal said.
Another advantage of the Volta system is when an ESP does fail, which is usually difficult to detect, Volta recognizes the failure, captures the information, and reports it to the customer.
In troubleshooting maintenance issues with ESPs, the Volta Insight also monitors the pump’s VFD (variable frequency drive), which saves time pinpointing exactly where the failure point is in the pump system. “There’s a huge saving there in maintenance cost, downtime, productivity,” Tangedal said. “It’s all about transparency and providing information that can be utilized immediately rather than waiting for hours or days.