StoneAge Inc is Durango’s manufacturer of high-pressure industrial cleaning equipment, the company has signed a contract with the U.S. Navy for a pilot initiative that may result in the provision of automated water-blast cleaning tools for the entire nation’s submarines and nuclear-powered aircraft carriers.
As an incentive, StoneAge will have the right to monetize the product. Therefore, it can make automated water-blast tools controlled by a computer brain called Compass available for commercial sale to the public. Paper and ethanol producers in particular have expressed interest in this product.
A few days earlier, StoneAge sent a device called “Tractor” to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. Tractor feeds line to users operating the lance that releases pressurized water at up to 40,000 pounds per square inch. StoneAge intends to ship the Sentinel that forms part of its Compass to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Washington by September.
StoneAge will benefit significantly from the acquisition of Breadware Inc., a Nevada internet-of-things services provider which provides the technical expertise required to automate the water-blast equipment. Breadware Inc. is instrumental in ensuring that the tools can clean with little human interaction but also collect consumer data to make better decisions. The acquisition of Breadware at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic was a tough decision, but it proved to be an important decision for moving StoneAge forward. The acquisition was completed in March 2020 among so many uncertainties but StoneAge was keen on becoming a player in the IoT-enabled products marketplace.
The Sentinel is a custom product specifically built for the Navy with a lance that can get into narrow spaces. The Navy is to use it to clean heat-exchanger tubes that are a part of the cooling units in its nuclear-powered vessels. A sailor currently cleans about a thousand tubes in one heat exchanger. Automating this task will increase the overall safety and efficiency because the Sentinel is estimated to carry out the task in 35 percent less time than that of a sailor’s manual approach. it is expected that the device will not skip any cleaning any tubes, an error that is very likely when the cleaning is done by a human. In addition, an operator must have line of sight in order to accurately and painstakingly move the tractors across numerous heat exchanger tubes. The Sentinel coupled with the Compass would result in a sailor operating the device remotely over a network.
Providing data is very important to the Navy because information on specific tube and cleaning durations would be provided by the equipment in real time. The gathered data will also assist StoneAge in learning more about improving the efficiency of the equipment because information on some parameters such as the number of hours and the amount of pressure the system requires for a single job will be available. This data will serve as a means for StoneAge to monitor and improve on the lifetime, performance and durability their products.
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Olamide is a technology consultant with cognate experience providing digital transformation services for small and large-scale clients globally. With a focus on emerging technologies like IoT, Extended Reality, Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence, he has spent three years developing numerous articles on these knowledge areas for different platforms online and offline.
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