San Diego, California—KLATU Networks announced today the award of its eighth patent in the field of Predictive Failure analytics for mission-critical refrigeration systems. US Patent 11,828,678 titled Managing the Effectiveness of Repairs in Refrigeration Assets describes a breakthrough asset benchmark scoring method, TRAXX Score. "Similar to FICO® Score, TRAXX Score measures the Quality of Repair" according to Rick Kriss, President of KLATU Networks. "By benchmarking post-repair performance of a repaired cold-storage system against its nominally-performing digital twin, customers and their Service Providers have a new tool to verify the immediate effectiveness of the repair—as well as the persistence of the repair six months later," said Kriss.
Fail-and-Fix Repairs: A Dark Industry Secret
The refrigeration and air conditioning repair industry generates more than $2.5 billion in revenues annually and employs more than 38,000 repair technicians whose fail-and-fix best practices have not changed in 50 years. “When mission critical cold storage systems are monitored for temperature but not condition, reliability and asset service life are minimized, while energy and maintenance costs and risks for product losses are maximized” said Kriss.
The refrigeration and air conditioning repair industry generates more than $2.5 billion in revenues annually and employs more than 38,000 repair technicians whose fail-and-fix best practices have not changed in 50 years. “When mission critical cold storage systems are monitored for temperature but not condition, reliability and asset service life are minimized, while energy and maintenance costs and risks for product losses are maximized” said Kriss.
KLATU research sponsored by a major utility found that 30-50% of all, even well-maintained, Ultra-Low Temperature (ULT) freezers in Life Science companies are operating out of spec, wasting an average of 22% of energy consumed. The study also found that 30% of all repairs were not effective or persistent six months later. The study inspired KLATU to add analytics to TRAXX in 2014.
In a Case Study that followed, 22 of 49 randomly selected ULTs showed signs of mechanical stress were projected to be wasting 53,659 kWh ($9,658) or $439 per ULT per year when compared to the performance of a nominally-performing ULT operating at the 50th percentile. Following repairs, a savings of 72,121 kWh ($12,981) or $590 per ULT was achieved. Payback for the repairs was less than one year with the Case Study also proving that restoring performance to better than the 50th percentile is not difficult.
Cold-Storage Performance and Optimization
The Quality of Repair feature is a must-have tool to identify ULTs showing hidden signs of mechanical stress that result in wasted energy, high maintenance costs, reduced asset service life, and potentially serious and disruptive issues affecting validation. Quality of Repair is among several new features that KLATU will release from its new Gen II AI services library. More than 100 billion records of cold storage data, continuously recorded by TRAXX over the last decade, are used to train KLATU’s cloud-hosted AI models. It is believed to be the largest such data repository in the world, according to Kriss.
KLATU’s AI models can consume time-series data from any data logger or monitoring system via an API and return a detailed report with a TRAXX Score that measures post-repair performance relative to its normalized digital twin. These AI models can generate custom reports such as repair cost and post-repair reliability correlated with asset manufacturer make/model, configuration, asset age or individual repair technician. The Quality of Repair feature will also be offered with a TRAXX Certificate of RepairTM, which customers will see as a third-party certification tool confirming the effectiveness and persistence of the repair based on an objective measurement—TRAXX Score.
“With TRAXX AI technology, KLATU can help Facilities and Lab Operations Managers do more with less,” said Kriss.
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About KLATU
Based in San Diego, CA, with operations also in MA, WA, and UT, KLATU Networks is a leading provider of wireless Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sensors, enterprise-scale cloud software, predictive failure analytics targeting cold-storage monitoring, and asset optimization applications for OEMs and companies in the life science industries.
Today, 8 of the top 10 and 15 of the top 25 largest life science companies rely on TRAXX monitoring and analytics to reduce operating and energy costs, as well as protect millions of dollars of pharmaceuticals and research from loss due to unplanned equipment failures.