Vodafone España, S.A.U., in collaboration with Capgemini, has developed two use cases for the Pilot 5G Andalucía project, which will being carried out at Cepsa’s (Madrid, Spain) La Rábida refinery in Palos de la Frontera (Huelva). These projects will show the suitability of 5G technology in industrial environments.
The projects will allow plant professionals to identify product transport pipelines in industrial facilities through a pioneering augmented reality project and also to monitor the state of rotating equipment through sensors connected to the 5G network, thus increasing the availability of instruments through predictive maintenance.
The new solution, through the application of the Capgemini’s Augmented Reality (AR) on Vodafone’s 5G network, allows operators to access the information regarding the pipes in real time, identify them autonomously recognizing them through the application developed and even receive expert support via videostreaming if necessary.
Cepsa currently has more than 300,000 sensors in its facilities that produce more than 170,000 signals every day. Vodafone has provided 5G coverage to the refinery to connect some of these sensors, specifically those that allow to monitor the rotating equipment included in this project. Emerson, as a technological partner for this use case, provides its advanced sensor which collects all the information from the monitored equipment to be finally processed in the Edge using predictive maintenance tools ensuring the reliability, availability and operational efficiency of rotating equipment.
This project is part of the “Pilot 5G Andalusia” initiative, promoted by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, through Red.es, and which is being developed by Vodafone and Huawei. Presented in November 2019 in Seville, it includes 35 use cases that will apply the benefits of 5G technology in the sectors of energy, industry, smart cities, tourism, agriculture, health and dependency, security, emergencies and defense, society and digital economy.