Vibration Monitoring
While all machinery vibrates, monitoring vibration is vital to detecting machine damage in a timely manner to prevent costly break-downs.
Unexpected equipment failures can be expensive and potentially catastrophic, resulting in unplanned production downtime, costly replacement of parts and safety and environmental concerns.
Vibration monitoring transmitters and sensors use accelerometers to measure changes in amplitude, frequency, and intensity of forces that damage rotating equipment. Studying these vibration measurements allows you to discover imbalance, looseness, misalignment, or bearing wear in equipment before it fails.
Vibration analysis can improve your maintenance and reliability programme by:
- Finding a developing problem that can be repaired to increase the lifespan of your machine.
Vibration can prematurely wear components and shorten the lifespan of equipment, create noise and result in safety issues. Imbalance or misalignment in rotating assets may crack or break driveshafts or other components. - Detecting and monitoring a chronic problem than cannot be repaired and will only get worse.
- Establishing acceptance testing criteria to ensure that installation/repairs are properly conducted.
- 24/7 continuous vibration monitoring can be used to predict failures as part of a predictive maintenance programme.
What should be monitored for vibration?
- Motor Vibration Monitoring
Motors generally experience high vibration levels at some point. Vibration monitoring can help pick up faults related to motor bearings, gearboxes and rotors. - Bearing Condition Monitoring
Bearing defects are often the cause of vibration in machinery Bearing defects can include excessive loads, true or false brinelling, overheating, reverse loading, normal fatigue failure, corrosion, loose or tight fits and misalignment. Vibration monitoring can help pick up these problems and help determine if repair or replacement is required.
- Gearbox Vibration Monitoring
Impacting and friction can occur in gearboxes. A single crack in a gear could cause a change in speed once the defective teeth are inside the load zone. This will result in impacting, and if there is insufficient lubrication for the gear teeth, friction will also occur. Vibration monitoring can help detect impacting and friction.
- Rotor Vibration Monitoring
Lateral vibrations can occur in rotors, including instability and unbalance along with other types of forces impacting the rotor. Cracks are often formed, leading to reduced natural frequencies as a result of reduced rigidness. Rotor vibration analysis can monitor the rotor’s behaviour and help locate a crack.
If you would like to have vibration testing conducted at your plant either as a one off assessment or as part of a regular preventative maintenance plan, then get in touch with the Electrical & Automation solutions (EAS) team today on 07 834 0505.
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