MilkHub Plant Performance

What’s the use of monitoring plant?

The MilkHub system monitors the performance of the plant stall by stall during the normal milking process. Abnormalities in equipment performance upstream from the MilkHub Sensor Unit are detected. This includes cups, liners, claw bowl seal, claw hole, hoses, long milk tube, and any ancillary equipment such as ACR vacuum cut off devices. These are the most vulnerable components of the milking plant since they are subject to the highest wear and tear through mechanical movement and animal impact.

Faults in plant can result in:

• Milk quality issues such as hygiene traps or excess foam in the milk
• Milking efficiency issues such as slow milking, cup slip and dropped cups
• Animal productivity issues such as under milking and teat irritation

How does the MilkHub detect abnormal plant performance?

The behaviour of the plant while milking is largely determined by the milking characteristics of the cow. This is highly variable making it difficult to identify any underlying behaviour due to the plant. The situation is further compounded by variation in installation type (consider for example the milk flow of a high-line and a low-line plant).

The MilkHub accrues stall equipment specific measures for every milking every day. Statistical analysis of data collected over a period of a few days removes the cow related variation and exposes the stall specific measurements.

Normal behaviour for the particular plant is determined by aggregating the stall specific measurements across all stalls. Abnormal behaviour is detected by the deviation of the stall specific measures from the normal level.

How good is the MilkHub?

The following 2 graphs illustrate 2 useful plant performance measures. To avoid clutter, the graphs only show measurements for stalls 1 through 10 from the 70-stall test-farm installation.

In general uniform height indicates all stalls are performing at the normal plant level.

The top graph shows a measure for cup slip where a high value is undesirable. This example cup slip is very uneven and indicates some stalls need attention. Likely causes are excess air or liner age.

The bottom graph indicates milk to air ratio where a low value is undesirable. Although less pronounced, this mirrors the slip performance and probably shares the same cause.

Other plant faults show in other measurements not illustrated here. For example variation in milking time is in part indicative of pulsator faults.