It all started at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago.
The technology behind SmartSignal started
as a new idea to solve one specific problem,
but soon grew to over 40 patents and
applications across industries.SmartSignal was born in the early 1990's when the Department of Energy asked researchers to develop a better tool for predicting problems at nuclear facilities after the failure of a coolant pump forced an emergency reactor shutdown at Idaho Falls, Idaho.
The Energy Department held a contest. It buried 10 faults in 18 months' worth of data from a coolant pump, recorded at one minute intervals, and asked researchers around the world to find the problems. The Argonne team crunched gigabytes of data and not only found the 10 hidden faults, but their software uncovered problems that were previously unknown.
The Argonne team later realized that they had stumbled upon a technique that could be used on other pieces of equipment. From there, the University of Chicago founded SmartSignal to commercialize this revolutionary technology.
Since then, over the past decade, SmartSignal constantly has expanded and refined the technology and its capabilities. It now is protected by over 40 patents and is used across equipment and OEMs and multiple industries worldwide to identify operational errors and predict equipment and process problems. |
