Moving beyond hazardous environments: extending predictive maintenance across industrial sites

Wireless technologies are helping make condition monitoring more practical across large facilities, including equipment that has historically been difficult or costly to connect.

For assets in hazardous environments or critical to production, understanding their condition can make the difference between a planned intervention and an expensive, unplanned shutdown. However, many other assets across an industrial facility can also affect reliability and productivity.

Pumps, motors, valves, transfer pipes and auxiliary equipment may not individually be considered critical, but failures can still disrupt production, increase maintenance workloads and divert engineers from higher-priority tasks.

The challenge has often been making condition monitoring commercially and technically practical across these less closely monitored assets.

Traditional monitoring infrastructure can be expensive to install, particularly in older facilities or where equipment is distributed across a large site. Running cables, upgrading networks and integrating additional hardware can make continuous monitoring difficult to justify for assets lower down the maintenance priority list.

As a result, many assets remain reliant on routine inspections or reactive maintenance. Extending condition monitoring can help operators take a more targeted approach.

Maintenance teams are under pressure to make better use of limited resources, while operators seek to improve efficiency and keep equipment running for longer.

Manually inspecting hundreds of assets is not always the most effective use of engineering time, particularly when much of the equipment may be operating normally. A more targeted approach uses condition data to help identify which assets need attention.

Condition monitoring provides more frequent, and in some cases continuous, information about equipment health. This can help maintenance teams identify changes in performance and investigate potential problems before they develop into failures.

Sensors can be configured to notify users automatically when measurements cross user-defined thresholds. Depending on the system, thresholds and measurement frequency can also be adjusted remotely, reducing the need for site visits to access individual sensors.

Wireless connectivity, including Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) technology, can help overcome infrastructure challenges that have historically restricted monitoring to the most critical assets.

LoRaWAN is designed for long-range, low-power communication. These characteristics make it suitable for large industrial sites where equipment may be distributed over considerable distances or difficult and expensive to connect using conventional cabling.

Wireless monitoring can therefore help operators extend visibility across a greater number of assets without installing a dedicated wired connection to each monitoring point. The overall infrastructure requirements will depend on the site, network coverage and deployment design.

High-speed control systems will continue to rely on wired communications where appropriate. Wireless condition monitoring complements these systems by providing information about equipment that may previously have sat outside the monitoring network.

The objective is not to connect every asset simply because the technology is available. It is to identify where additional information can improve maintenance decisions.

Vibration monitoring illustrates how additional condition data can support maintenance decisions. Basic measurements can indicate that an asset is changing, while analysis across a wider range of vibration frequencies can help identify fault patterns associated with bearing problems, misalignment and mechanical looseness.

This provides maintenance teams with more information to investigate potential faults, rather than simply alerting them that an asset may require attention. In more advanced implementations, vibration data can be collected and analysed automatically, reducing the need for technicians to revisit equipment to retrieve detailed measurements or carry out additional manual inspections.

Temperature monitoring offers another example. Existing control systems may already measure temperatures at key points in a process, but gaps can remain elsewhere. Transfer pipes between operational skids, for instance, can be overlooked, even though heating or cooling problems may cause blockages and production stoppages.

Wireless temperature sensors can help bring these less visible parts of an industrial process into the monitoring strategy, providing additional information without necessarily requiring extensive new cabling.

Equipment operating in potentially explosive atmospheres requires appropriately certified solutions. However, not every asset on a petrochemical or industrial site is located within a hazardous area.

Historically, the cost and complexity associated with certified monitoring technology could make it difficult to justify monitoring assets in non-hazardous areas. Non-Ex monitoring solutions offer an alternative for applications that do not require hazardous-area certification, helping operators extend condition monitoring across a wider range of equipment.

The same approach can be relevant beyond petrochemicals. Manufacturing, automotive, power, pulp and paper, and other industries can consider how broader condition monitoring could support equipment reliability and maintenance planning.

Existing customers using IMI TWTG NEON technology have reported reductions of:

These figures are customer-reported results published by IMI. Actual outcomes will vary according to the site, equipment, operating conditions and maintenance strategy. They nevertheless illustrate the potential value of using condition data to move towards more proactive maintenance.

A monitoring strategy that works for 20 assets may not be suitable for 500. As deployments expand, battery life, installation requirements, data management and the ability to update devices remotely become increasingly important.

IMI TWTG NEON devices use low-power LoRaWAN connectivity and battery power to support monitoring deployments. Over-the-air updates allow firmware changes to be made remotely, helping simplify device management as installations grow.

The scale of deployment also reflects growing interest in extending monitoring beyond traditionally prioritised assets. At the time of the original article, more than 2,000 non-Ex IMI TWTG NEON monitoring units had been ordered for deployment across industrial sites.

These developments create opportunities to extend condition monitoring without assuming that every asset needs the same level of instrumentation or analysis. The appropriate approach depends on the equipment, the consequences of failure and the value that additional information can deliver.

The next step for predictive maintenance is to consider where limited visibility across the wider plant is creating unnecessary risk, cost or downtime.

Monitoring should be guided by the decisions the data can support, rather than by the number of sensors that can be installed. The objective is to make useful information available where it can influence maintenance priorities and operational performance.

When engineers can identify a developing fault before it causes equipment failure, maintenance can be planned around production requirements. When remote monitoring replaces routine manual checks, engineering teams can spend more time addressing issues that genuinely require their expertise.

Wireless technologies such as LoRaWAN can help make monitoring commercially practical for assets that were previously too difficult or expensive to connect.

Combined with appropriate sensors and data analysis, they can support a broader approach to equipment reliability across industrial facilities.

Predictive maintenance is not simply about installing more sensors or collecting more data. It is about having enough useful information, at the right time, to make better maintenance decisions.

Till Sereny is Managing Director for Digital and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), at IMI.

A version of this article appeared on Operations Engineer in October 2026.

Learn more about LoRaWAN: Understanding LoRaWAN: extending industrial condition monitoring

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