Condition and Machine Monitoring
Condition Monitoring Software made Easy - Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering IESE in Kaiserslautern, Germany, have developed a condition monitoring system for Lösi GmbH, which can adapt to various facilities without the need for manual programming. From ISA.
Machine Condition Monitoring Technical Library - Machine Condition Monitoring is the process of monitoring the condition of a machine. Vibration, noise, and temperature measurements are often used as key indicators of the state of the machine. Trends in the data provide health information about the machine and help detect machine faults early, which prevents unexpected failure and costly repair. This link from National Instruments has some good condition monitoring articles.
The Case for Condition Monitoring - What exactly is condition monitoring? How does it differ from other maintenance philosophies? And in what way does it impact the discipline of control engineering in the typical plant? Steve Sabin provides some answers. Thanks to Control Engineering Asia.
Selecting & Installing Accelerometers - Over the past decade, trending vibration parameters has become the most widely-used technology for monitoring machinery health. Industrial accelerometers have become the workhorse in the Predictive Maintenance market. These sensors are extremely rugged, provide a wide dynamic range, and are available in a variety of configurations to meet individual installation requirements.Confusion often arises when selecting the proper accelerometer for a given application. There are many good general purpose accelerometers that may address 80% of the applications. It is the other 20% that require special vibration sensors. These applications may include very high frequency monitoring, very low frequency measurements, very low amplitude, high temperature installations, and many others. This paper/presentation outlines the basic design characteristics of accelerometers. Special attention will be given to describing the criteria that makes up specialty sensors such as a low frequency accelerometer. Application guidance will be given regarding installing accelerometers, mounting techniques, and cabling. From Davidson.
Accelerometer Selection Considerations - Jim Lally - This paper reviews sensor selection considerations involving two general types of piezoelectric sensors. High impedance, charge mode (PE) type and Integral Electronic Piezo Electric (referred to as IEPE) with a characteristic low impedance output. In addition to sensor electrical and physical characteristics, several factors play a role in the selection of an accelerometer for a specific application. These factors include environmental, operational, channel count and system compatibility considerations.From Davidson.
Condition Monitoring in the 21st Century - Sandy Dunn - This paper outlines some of the key business opportunities and issues which are driving change in the industry, summarise some of the resulting trends and then draws some conclusions regarding the implications of these trends for Condition Monitoring equipment manufacturers and suppliers, Condition Monitoring contractors, and organisations employing Condition Monitoring techniques.The focus of this paper is on Vibration Monitoring technologies, but many of the issues, opportunities, trends and implications are similar across the other areas of Condition Monitoring technology. Thanks to plant-maintenance.com.
Condition Monitoring: Misused and Misunderstood - Mark Liebler - Condition monitoring is perhaps the most misused and misunderstood of all industrial plant improvement programs. It is typically defined as a means of preventing catastrophic failure in critical rotating machinery - such as power generation plant, larger pumps and main arterial conveying systems - and providing the data needed to accurately determine the optimal schedule for maintenance activities on this plant. It is largely viewed as a “maintenance tool”, with little relevance to plant management and operations.In truth, condition monitoring can and should play a much broader role in the modern industrial operations: it is a tool that helps effectively manage site plant assets, logistics and labour requirements. Thanks to ferret.com.au.
Look for Signs of Failure to Protect Critical Assets - Deane Horn - Complete online monitoring of the plant’s most critical assets includes shutdown protection, predictive, and performance monitoring – all integrated with the process automation system. Rotating equipment seldom fails without providing hints well in advance. Machinery health warning signs come in the form of vibration changes, process parameter changes, and performance changes to name a few. So imagine a form of machinery protection that allows you to anticipate and recognise these warning signs. A complete protection strategy can then be formulated based on the use of early information gathered from a combination of vibration, performance, and process data. Shutdown protection would be relegated to the last line of defence, and costly outages could be eliminated. Advanced technologies, including online and wireless vibration monitoring and ASME calculations based equipment performance, can all be integrated with the process control system to nurture the health of machinery that is essential to maintaining uninterrupted production - from Emerson Process Management.
Embedded Motor Condition Monitoring, Diagnostics - Embedded condition monitoring and remote diagnostics prevent equipment failure, reduce energy consumption, improve reliability - Only a very small percentage of critical motors and motor loads in the U.S. actually are equipped with any sort of condition monitoring. This lack of adoption largely stems from the costs and complexity of conventional condition monitoring equipment. Industry-leading solid-state, motor control technology provides customers with the ability to monitor parameters, albeit not the exact same parameters, to gain a more precise and real-time perspective on performance, far more simply than traditional condition monitoring methods - from ISA and InTech.
Where Did All the People Go? The New Case for Condition Monitoring - Not so long ago the main reason companies monitored equipment condition was to reduce direct maintenance expenses. Condition Monitoring (CM) and its logical extension, Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM), served them well by identifying impending failures early enough to avoid costly repairs and reducing downtime by only performing maintenance when required - from www.automation.com
Condition-Based Maintenance - How Predictive Strategies Can Effectively Limit Downtime - Eduardo Ba - A series of useful questions and answers on Condition Based Maintenance - from www.flowcontrolnetwork.com.
Machinery Fault Diagnosis Guide - Unbalance, misalignment, bearing failures, gear faults, motor electrical problems, etc. are typical faults experienced in all equipment. Identification and elimination of these faults and other issues are critical to maintaining the health of your plant equipment. Healthy equipment means lower maintenance cost, increased uptime, better product quality and a safer work environment for employees. This illustrated guide will help you determine the most common equipment problems using vibration analysis as a diagnosis tool - from Processing News
Wireless for Asset Uptime - Jonas Berge explains how WirelessHart technology can be used to increase plant asset performance by enabling key additional measurements without extensive disruption. Asset monitoring requires additional measurements for which instrumentation is rarely included in the plant while laying cable, opening cable trays, and rewiring junction boxes is high, and therefore improvements don't get done. WirelessHart instrumentation drastically reduces risk since full multi-hop, multi-path, mesh topology eliminates all cables - Thanks to Jonas Berge and Control Engineering Asia
Smart Sensing: Situational Awareness - Jonas Berge - Plant safety can be improved by making available important information to the relevant crew members at the right time. Smart sensing in this regard can improve the situational awareness of plant staff and as such improve operational effectiveness and safety.We sometimes read about plant disasters in the news, and every so often the cause has been a manual valve which was believed to be closed but was actually open. The information did not get passed on to the new shift crew at the shift change. Had they known the valve was open, had they had that crucial piece of information, the disaster might not have happened. We tell ourselves ‘had I only known,’ and we also say hindsight is 20/20. WirelessHART technology provides a way to add important measurements and feedback to the operators to improve situational awareness. As such, enabling them to make better informed decisions based on actual information rather than having to deduce or infer information from other variables. Transmitters using this technology can easily be installed in older plants - Thanks to Jonas Berge and Industrial Automation.
Maintenance with a Hart - Jonas Berge - With finite resources, there is often not enough time to manually inspect, clean, and service all the process equipment around the plant to help prevent failures and downtime. The existing primary layer of wired process control for automation, found on the P&ID, is no longer sufficient. Deploying a “second layer” of wireless coverage of missing measurements to automate process equipment inspection, that goes “beyond the P&ID”, can help the maintenance department become more effective - Thanks to Jonas Berge and Control Engineering Asia.
