Modernization framework for real-time monitoring of legacy belt conveyor systems

Abstract

Legacy conveyor systems remain widely deployed across manufacturing industries but often lack the sensing, connectivity, and real-time monitoring capabilities required for alignment with Industry 4.0 objectives. As critical material-handling assets, their unexpected failures, particularly at the induction motor drive, result in unplanned downtime, production disruptions, and higher maintenance costs. While system monitoring frameworks have been extensively studied for advanced or newly designed equipment, their application to retrofitting legacy assets, such as conveyor systems, remains limited. This work presents a structured framework for modernizing legacy belt conveyor systems through the integration of sensing, control, and visualization technologies to enable real-time operational monitoring. The induction motor of the conveyor has been retrofitted with multiple sensors, including temperature, vibration, current, and voltage, providing comprehensive data acquisition on the system’s performance. The acquired data were processed through a programmable logic controller (PLC) and integrated into the Ignition supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) platform, where a digital dashboard has been developed to visualize live operational states, trigger alarms, and record historical trends. The primary contribution of this study is a modular brownfield retrofit workflow that integrates multimodal sensing with PLC-based signal processing and SCADA visualization. Experimental validation under real operating conditions confirmed the operational correctness and effectiveness of the proposed framework and modernized system. The study establishes a foundation for real-time monitoring of legacy belt conveyor systems and demonstrates an extensible path to modernize non-digital manufacturing assets.