Drew Walts with IRISS

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial talk, Scott Mackenzie, Drew Walts, IRISS, ultrasound technology, electrical challenges, infrared, data centers, IoT solutions, sound analysis, AI integration, asset management, predictive maintenance, safety, innovation.

00:00

Scott, welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots and let's go.

00:22

All right, welcome to command central for industrial talk. Thank you very much for joining you industrial Gladiator, you ideal warrior. We are here to celebrate you and to be able to amplify that message, that conversation here on industrial talk. We thank you very much for joining this platform that celebrates industrial professionals all around the world. You are leaving a legacy. You're making the world a better place. And we thank you so much. It's an amazing time out there, I gotta tell you, it's amazing the amount of change and activity and insights and innovation and technology is happening. It's an exciting time. You've got to be just jazzed about it. I'm so excited about what's taking place in industry. All right, in the hot seat, speaking of which, Drew Walts with IRISS, and we're talking about a technology, the technology to be able to quickly identify, before failure, electrical challenges within your operation. So you know you're out there. And we're going to go in significant detail. So you go to a box, you're able to identify through ultrasound. Whether there are some challenges out there, there's other tools out there, but this is just an absolutely marvelous, marvelous solution. Let's get cracking. I didn't do a good job at that. I mean, this is an exciting time. IRISS leading away with their solutions, with their insights, with their team, the team, and we're always talking about teams. So here's the deal, here's here's my soapbox that I am asking you industrial professionals that we want to do this, but I want us to come together, whatever that looks like, and be able to inspire the next generation, be able to have a platform in place that truly encourages the next generation of leaders to be a part of industry that we've got to do it. We've you are doing so many great things out there, and nobody hears it. We have to start young. We have to tell and express and explain what we're doing. Automation, manufacturing is off the charts. The technology is everywhere, and it just continues to go and go. And that application of these solutions need to be discussed. And it's just and the money, let's just sort of throw it out there. There's capital markets. There are capital and the money out there that is looking to help companies succeed, we just with there's so much going on, and we need to tell that story. You need to be on this podcast and to be able to explain that you, it's up to you. I'm pointing at you in the video. Yeah, right. There you be. Leave that legacy, be a part of this amazing time that we have in industry, please. It's important. There's my soapbox. I'm passionate about it, and we're going to continue to push and we're going to continue to look for companies to collaborate with us to get that message out. They're, they're all around the world. We get we've got to do a better job. Let's do it. Let's make it happen. Let's leave that legacy. Let's, let's amplify that voice and and just definitely, from the from the rooftop, shout out the fact that you guys are changing the world and and people can participate in that change. It's absolutely extent. And you can tell I'm, I'm all hopped up on caffeine right now, but it's all good. All right. Drew Waltsz. IRISS is the company they're they're amazing. They have so many solutions, and they have and they're passionate. They are so passionate about company and their success, and they just are committed that they're amazing, an incredible culture, incredible company, incredible people all at IRISS. Here. Enough with me. Here's Drew. There is Drew. Welcome to industrial talk, and that's Waltsz with an S. We went through that process. I want to make sure that everybody understands it's only 1l 1t and an S.

05:11

How you doing? Drew, I'm good bud. How you been Scott,

05:13

well, thank you. Always good to see you. Yeah.

05:17

So always great to talk to you.

05:20

Yeah, it is, have you been on my show before? I have,

05:23

right? Yes, New Orleans.

05:27

That was a long time ago.

05:29

It's been, it's been a hot minute, but I've watched a lot of your takes, so it's always good to see you.

05:34

06:03

I've seen some pretty long bumper stickers.

06:08

All right. Before we get into the conversation about Sonas, there's a couple of products, you know. But let's give us a little background on why Drew is an incredible asset management professional talk to us.

06:23

Well, I refer to myself as a subject matter enthusiast when it comes to ultrasound and infrared. I've been in the industry almost 25 years now. My first experience was six. Well, I just turned 55 so it's it's been a little bit longer than that, but my first introduction, it was a compliment, you and your you. I appreciate it. Your glow. I did the Grecian formula to hide all the grace before this event. So well done. Well done. But I started off with infrared in the military, and then got started with UE systems. Everybody knows UE systems, great product, and worked with them for 16 years as trainer, traveled the world, saw the world, experienced a lot of stuff. I was also a firefighter at the same time, so I was using infrared for building envelope testing, not quite the same building envelope that we want to do in industrial segment, but those two passions of mine, I've always wanted to blend them. So when I started my own company and Martin gave me an offer I couldn't refuse, as I like to say, it was perfect. You know, just come in here and start working with infrared and ultrasound and develop training for them, and now that's scaled into doing some service work. So it's, it's kind of great to be able to use those two technologies, because they're so easy to to blend together to find out what's going on, electrically or mechanically or steam traps. I mean, there's just so many things that we can do with these technologies, and it's always fascinating and captivated me to try to figure out what's

07:51

going on here. Here's a softball question, Martin's A cool guy.

07:55

Oh, Martin's the best, like his his personality, traveling with him, knowing him for all these years, working with him out Pittsburgh, with the tag group, and just seeing around different shows. He's a hoot. So, yeah, he

08:07

is. He's a lot of fun. And and IRISS has been in. IRISS has been around for many years, right? How many? How many years? How old is IRISS?

08:15

08:58

Is it, is it safe to say that IRISS is vertically integrated from a manufacturing perspective. You guys manufacture your tools and then you just also deploy them as well.

09:08

Yeah. And the other thing is, we provide solutions. So we, you know, we, we provide that opportunity to our clients and to our distributors to give them multiple things that they can bring to the inspection realm. You know, whether it's Windows or thermochromatics or handheld tools or IoT solutions and then sound analysis, software, training, mentorship, program and service work, it's just like whatever they need we can pretty much provide.

09:34

It's been a company that's really centered around power switch gears, things like that. Is that? Is that accurate?

09:44

Yeah, and the big take off for a lot of companies like IRISS right now is data centers like that's just exploding, to

09:53

use the term, but it's on fire that is crazy out there. About the data centers way above my pay grade, the demand for power is off the I can't. I'll just sit there and talk about it. I don't want to try to strategize solutions so my head will blow up. So let's, let's talk a little bit about that. You know, we, we've had conversations in the past. Yeah, you have the ability to be able to inspect power equipment in a safe way, be able to identify potential failures, but you do it again, you do it in a way that eliminates that risk of being able to say, Hey, I'm going in there. I'm going to I'm going to inspect this gear, but I'm going to do it in a safe way. Yes, there's a problem now I can, now I can address it. We have a product here that I'm looking at as Sonus. Now we've got Sonus viz and Sonus XT must be extra or something. Glad you were able to get the name with X in it, because that's always the that's always said, that's important stuff. Give us just a know the thinking behind Sonus. What is it?

11:22

So Sonus is our ultrasound product line, and we have two offerings. We have the XT that you mentioned, which is your traditional, piezo based ultrasonic device, headset, contact module, parabolic dish, airborne probe, long range horn, directional tube, pretty much the standard kit, but it's very, very small, and that's the benefit of it, like it'll fit in your back pocket. That's how tiny it is compared to some of those ultrasound units. So it's a great choice. And the price points, you know, that's another thing that's pretty phenomenal. So that basic ultrasound unit can be used to pair up with a laptop or a tablet that's Windows based. So you can use our Sonus view recorder, and that's one of the other products in the Sonus line, is our sound analysis software which works with any product. So I've used it with UE clients. I've used it with SDT. I've used it with Sona tech, and, of course, I've used it with some of the TEV detection devices as well too, that have audible quality to analyze sound waves. Now you partner that up with something like our Acoustic Camera, the Sonus Fizz, which I did happen to bring today, which is a tablet based camera, good

12:32

little, yeah. Hey, is that? Is that? Can I? Can I take it out in the field and sort of bump it around a little bit, is there, is it sort of, Is it strong?

12:45

Yeah, it's pretty robust. I just did a survey a couple months ago in July in the middle of the heat and 600 test points. And ran through 600 test points over three days with it, and had it my cargo pocket, dropped it a couple times on the rubble in the sub yard, and it was pretty robust. So good.

13:06

I digress. Continue

13:10

destruction testing

13:12

right there, because you know, you know you're gonna get these guys out in the field, you know, banging around and

13:21

caveman hook, as I call them. Yeah, they are

13:25

very good. But let me ask you this, so I have these tools. They're great. They're compact, they're powerful. They're collecting data. They're doing everything that I need to have done, Does, does IRISS, because I have to go down this road. I have to so bear with me. Do we have a solution, a data analytics solutions? Because I'm firing in data, I'm capturing data, I'm looking at data, but do you have a solution that helps me analyze that data?

14:00

Yeah, yeah. So that's the the benefit of the Sonus fizz. That one is a cloud based data platform. So all this data you collect in the field, all the notes, all the extra pictures you take, any observations that you put in there, that all goes seamlessly to the cloud. And then on the portal you can open it up, and you can look at the sound wave in a time wave form, and you can play it on the portal. Then you can download the sound wave, and you can do the analytical part, if you want to do a deep dive on Are there any harmonics? Is this Corona? Is it surface training? Is it tracking? So we have the Sonus view software for that aspect. So then you can really pick apart the sound waves. It's probably my favorite sound analysis software platforms that's out there versus all the ones I've used in the past. So that gives us capability to pinpoint exactly what's going on. And I had another event that I wrote an article on about where we found a non linear load related issue with the Sonus line recording to the Sonus view in the field. And. We picked up this 360 Hertz harmonic that was prevalent in this bus bar that was connecting the old, 65 year old transformer to the rectifier, and that 360 Hertz ended up being a non linear load issue, and then we're also able to see the loose connections, and then the dirty power that's being created by the deformation of the shunts. So it was really cool that we had so many things going on on this old trans the transformer. When we cracked it open, too, that oil was just perfectly clean, and to see that it wasn't the transformer that was 65 years old, but just these shunts connecting to the rectifier where the problem was, was pretty cool.

15:37

Let's see. But the how do you take that tsunami of data. Is there a way of being able to sort of that's fine. Thanks. Here's some interesting data. How do you am I? Are you still dependent on me? Looking at That Sound wave, knowing that that squiggly line means something bad, or it's all normal, or whatever it might be, it's a squiggly line to people like me. Yeah.

16:02

So one of the things that we've always taught is that Decibels are not the best indication of electrical failure. It really does come down to that harmonic pattern. So we teach in our classes that we look at the time waveform, because it's the easiest one to see a repetitive pattern. When we see repeating patterns, that's generally not good, because most time for electrical stuff, we shouldn't hear anything ultrasonically. So then you throw in something like our TEV detection devices. Now suddenly you've got it in both ranges, ultrasound and in TEV mode. Then you've definitely got something going on so you can escalate it. But yeah, it does at the end of the day for now, for right now, come down to somebody analyzing the harmonics. What's on the horizon for us is what everybody's big catch phrase is right now, is AI, and it is,

16:48

whether you like it or not, it's going to happen, and it's going to make people more efficient, and it's going to see things a little bit. But it still does not. It does not listen to me. Listener, listen to me. Listener, it does not remove the human element from it. It just says, Hey, you need to look at this. And when you say, hey, I need to look at it, it's, I'm looking at it, right? Yeah. So it's, that's, that's what's important.

17:13

And that's where our front end, the way we're doing our enhanced layer approach for electrical inspection is with our IoT solutions that'll be coming out soon, the E century Connect, you would have different sensors that would tell you different things, temperature, humidity, ultrasound emissions. Is there a harmonic in that ultrasound emission that's electrical of 50 hertz or 60 hertz? So all these things would be your front line constant monitoring. And then when you get that little chirp or alert, then you can send out somebody like myself to go out and do a more deep dive with infrared, with ultrasound, with partial discharge testing, so then you can collect more data and really come up to the correct decision on what you need to do next based off the fault condition.

17:55

Yeah, yeah. And when we start talking about this Sonus product, you know, you got the thermometer, you get the thermography, you've got the vibration, you've got all these other tools that that can be deployed. Is this, this solution captures potential degradation sooner than all these other potential devices? Or do you take them and say, Hey, check it out. I've I've got this Sonus waveform happening. Let me just pull in some thermal let me just sort of start pulling it in and it gives it paints that picture. Or, how does it all work together?

18:36

That's a great question, because one of the things that we like to also speak about is, for years, there's always been this animosity between technology companies, like, oh, you know, infrared is the best for this. Yeah, sounds the best for that.

18:49

You go to these events and it's like, I'm I'm all in on the ultrasound. Nothing else works, right? Yes, rocking it down the aisle, yeah. No, absolutely continue.

19:00

20:06

Gas analysis? He's acronym in it, but that's what that sorry. No apologies necessary. I did a project and and it was all around transformer oil, gas analysis. Nice, yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Because transformers don't move much. They've they don't have spinning wheels. And you know, you look at a transformer and it's just, well, there it is.

20:32

Yeah. But when you walk up to an oil filled transformer, 138 KV, and the ground is literally shaking on it, you know, you're gonna be picking stuff up across the board. So, oh

20:44

yeah. So you we take all this information and then we come up that analogy that you provided in in what you said, July or June, one of those July, in your efforts to create and identify 600 and some odd points of Did you say, hey, client, check this out. Look at that. Look at this. You need to deploy this. We're going to capture it before it begins to fail. Is that? Was that? What drew brought to the table?

21:13

Well, so this, this facility was, it was triage. It was a triage. They had had several faults. They wanted us up there. They wanted basically a third party come in. And I collected everything I could. But there was so much going on in the yards that I literally stopped testing every switch, every connection, every bushing, and just focused on the the breakers and the transformers and and all the critical asset because all that other Corona, like you've got Corona throughout the yard, was what was reported. And here's your really critical ones. You know, this, this transformer here, heat indications, TEV indications, ultrasound indications, physical vibration in the ground, discoloration all over, you know, little housekeeping, what needs to be done, like, just those recommendations, and it's on the client at the end of the day to make the decision on what to do, because we're going to present the information and say, Hey, this is historically, what this condition shows up in ultrasound. This is this condition with TEV. This is this condition with infrared. All three confirm that you need to now take steps to do the next thing. Maybe you do some high pot testing. Maybe you do some power quality testing. Maybe you do some cleaning. You know, it's, it's always the easiest one.

22:29

Why? That brings back a lot of memories, but it's in black and white now, and they have to do something with it. They can't have a document. They can't have this documentation out there just sort of floating. They have to do something about it. How does, how does your solutions? How do they get it into their because everybody, somebody has it, their system of record, their CMS, or their asset performance management software, whatever it might be, how do they get that information associated with that asset? And saying, here's the history, you know, create that historian insight into that asset.

23:04

Yeah. So the great thing with the Sonus Fizz is that I can drop Asset Tags. NFC enabled asset tags on that, place it on the actual asset, and then I can reference that next time I'm back out. But the data itself, if you have Wi Fi connection, it'll automatically go up to the cloud based platform, so it's, you know, hosted through AWS, like just about everybody else in the world, yeah, and if I don't have internet connection, like some of the surveys I've been on, then once I get back to the hotel room, it'll upload once I'm on the internet, and then I can access all that data on there. I can export my reports in PDF format or a CSV, and then save it as an Excel and then, you know, color code it do what I want chop it. But the dashboard also reports to me. In the case of leaks, I can determine how many leaks they have, what the costing was per leak, overall global consumption. And then if we did any repairs while there, I can show them how much cost avoidance we're able to facilitate for them while we're on site.

24:05

Yeah, I like that. Yeah, that makes sense. Is there going to be in the view of IRISS and these solutions, because we all have these IoT devices out there, and it, it's, you know, constantly monitoring, let's say, heat, and constantly monitoring vibration, constantly doing what it needs to do, and in the hopes of being able to sort of predict the failure of that asset and get out there before it just has this catastrophic failure. Good makes sense. That's what needs to happen. Do you think there will be a similar device, from an ultrasound perspective, to be able to do part of that, that IoT stack, there's an ultrasound device.

24:53

Yeah, that's, that's actually one of the ones that we have in development. It's MEMS based. It's going to be called the. DTU, and that'll be part of what I like to call the hive, because they look like the hex shape. So when you stack the different sensors together, it always reminds me like a beehive. And then, so that would be the first line of defense. And again, that one's going to focus solely on, is there a 60 or 50 hertz harmonic that is showing up in that anomaly? And then from there, that would be used to deploy. And then we've got some other ones on the horizon that will go more in depth. I'm not, can't get into too much details on what we're gonna be doing on the next ones. But, you know, smart windows are on the horizon. These IoT devices, everything, everything, being IoT is great, but you have to have the ability to react to that, because I think it was Bentley, Nevada just did a study where they they called it analysis paralysis, yeah, where there's so much data coming in that people just don't know what to do. So now, if you can have that criticality on it, and let you know a little bit more that, hey, this is pretty high priority. You've got arcing occurring, or you've got tracking occurring, or you've got dirty power that puts a little more precedent, rather than saying, Hey, we hit an alarm value.

26:04

So because ideally, ideally, the solutions, the technology is in place, being able to do what it needs to do, and everything, fine, fine, fine, fine. Oh, here's the challenge, notify the right individuals. They go out there, it just, you know, kicks off a series of events that are all designed to make sure that there's no catastrophic failure, you know, whatever it and you do it safely, right, correct? You know that, to me, is power is well, safety is it? You know, it just is. And power tends to be, you know, you hyper focus on safety there, because, well, you don't get many chances after the fact Well,

26:44

and that's exactly it, and that's one of the things that I've struggled with in the 25 years in the industry now, Scott is, why is it we're testing motors monthly, but we're only testing the electrical system annually at best? Yeah, if we don't, if that asset's not working, and we stopped losing power. Then how much of production is shut down because the sub yard had a catastrophic failure that we didn't do anything about. We didn't do any cleaning, we didn't do any tightening and testing like you know, IoT can be helpful, as long as on the back end, you've got that technician that can go out with the handheld tools to follow up, and you have that program that's willing to say, hey, we need to do something about this.

27:25

Yeah, all of, all of the, and I have to say, all, all of the, the industrial visits that I've made. Nobody really looks at those electrical assets. And there are rats nest some, literally, something inside, crawling around. Yeah. No, it,

27:47

yeah. We just had things on that survey that they had four birds nest underneath the four different bushings. I'm like, okay,

27:56

when I hear I digress. So when I was a lineman for Southern California, Edison, we have these towers coming out of Long Beach, California, tall, massive, right? Amazing size. They're 470 feet tall. So yeah, but the problem was, was the fact that you'd get these, I want to say they were, were they egrets? I can't remember. There were certain bird long wingspan, right? They'd build their nest. And of course, it's always up there, nests up there, if we didn't take care of that. And it happened all the time that these birds would go phase to ground, phase to phase. Yeah, die. But boom, shut everything down because we left the nest up there. Not good. You got to take care of that. You're absolutely right. You got to be on it. No no excuses on that one. That's my nest story. All right, as we wrap this conversation up, where do you see it going, outside of the fact that we talked about the device being able to do it in a more real time basis. You don't have to have somebody out there, but it just sort of, is there anything else on the horizon that people need to be aware of?

29:12

31:21

So, yeah, you know, I remember when, like you probably remember when, because you've been at it for what, 75 years, but I remember when, when, when we started talking about thermography. I remember when we got one, or when I worked at Southern California Edison to take a shot at bushings and all of the whatever, we thought it was the greatest thing. But you'd, you'd have to wheel it out in a duck,

31:50

you know, size of a small truck. And I thought,

31:54

nitrogen tank, right?

31:57

I we didn't know anything about it. It's like, okay, we got nowadays, it's, you know, right here on your on your cell phone can be, yep, that's pretty exciting. How do people get a hold of you? DREW. If somebody says, I want to talk to Drew and and know a little bit more about IRISS and the solutions that are being provided, how do they get a

32:16

hold of you? Well, they can reach out to me via email. It's D, and then my last name, W, A, L, T, S, at, IRISS, I, R, i, s, s.com, I'm also on LinkedIn. I've got a pretty good following on LinkedIn. I don't post a lot of stuff. It's usually articles. Mostly, I might reshare something from the marketing department. I try to be too sales. I try to be more, hey, this is what we we just did. Or, hey, here's a find, or here's how you can use this. And you can always contact me via WhatsApp or cell phone number. I don't know. Can I give out a cell phone number?

32:54

Yeah, let's just keep it at LinkedIn, pull off on that one. Okay, so LinkedIn be a great way, and my email are a great way to

33:03

interact with you and then send you whatever I need. But I'm literally available to the community. One things I love about Martin is that he wants myself, my counterpart in the UK, as technical service managers, to be available to the community. And I literally, when I start reaching out to people, or they reach out to me, I'm available to them seven days a week, from 7am to 11pm at night like I love dealing with this stuff, and I've helped out our guys in the Middle East quite often. I've done some parties late night sessions on online at 2am so I don't mind switching my time to help somebody else out, because that's the thing. Like all these technologies and all these companies that provide these technologies are great, but they're only as good as the understanding that the user has, because if that user doesn't understand it, then they're gonna say, Oh, this equipment's garbage, and it it just dampens the enthusiasm of that equipment and that technology. And if I don't want that for any company or for any user of ultrasound or IR, I want to be able to help them to gain an understanding of why they're struggling with that aspect, or why they're not able to do this with this aspect. So reach out at any time

34:12

that's Drew, Drew big card right there. He's there for you. He's there for your success.

34:20

For you do things safely and get that data that you need to be able to be successful. Hey, you were great group.

34:29

Thanks, Scott, always a pleasure talking with you again. We're gonna have all the contact information for you

34:34

out on industrial talk his LinkedIn stack cart, which is really pretty cool. So reach out to him. Put that as a high priority to do. Okay, all right, wrapping it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

34:48

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

34:58

Another two. See, you can tell another Kraken solution being offered by those wonderful individuals at Team IRISS. Isn't that great? It never stops. Every day I'm on this podcast every day, every day of the week, I'm having conversations with innovative companies like IRISS, talking about how they can help you solve problems. How can you argue with that? That's just amazing stuff. And it just keeps going and going. I always have, every day, something that says, Really, you can do that set that is that possible. It's like Holy, holy captain. It's amazing. All right, we're building a platform to inspire the next generation of industrial leaders. Industrial talk wants to hear from you so that we can continue to build a legacy that inspires the next generation. Be bold. Be brave. Dare greatly hang out with Drew chase the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned. You.