FEATURE Machine Safety
Condition-based maintenance for healthy machines
An effective maintenance program increases uptime, decreases maintenance costs, reduces unplanned outages and extends the live cycle of assets, writes Ankush Malhotra, President at Fluke Reliability
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n today’s highly-competitive market, companies of all sizes are looking for ways to run a leaner and more-effi cient operation. In great part this is enabled
by an eff ective maintenance program, which must include a way to collect and analyse data. Motors are critical in just about every manufacturing plant and facility, and they suff er from vibration, so collecting and analysing vibration data is of crucial importance to a plant. For example: � Food and beverage plants often operate on tight margins. That can make reliability maintenance a challenge to implement, especially since these facilities are interested in training and the ability to scale to cover critical assets. � Automotive manufacturing operations often have larger reliability teams and stronger buy-in for downtime prevention. � Machinery-manufacturing plants vary in their approach to reliability, but condition- monitoring applications are getting faster. All these industries must integrate data and analytics into their maintenance programs to transform them into reliability programs. The right program increases equipment availability and performance by identifying and removing the cause of potential failures. Reliability programs can signifi cantly reduce the possibility of failure and its impact. Some of the frustrations with current condition-monitoring solutions include lack of high-precision, in-depth intelligence, time-consuming, complex installation and setup, and limited diagnostic range and service off erings, all adding to the total cost of ownership. In addition, some condition-monitoring solutions can be hard to scale to multiple assets, and data sets for individual products are often siloed, which leads to systems detecting only one type of fault. Wired and wireless-only sensors are often incompatible with plant network infrastructure, resulting in reams of unusable data.
As maintenance is a means to operate safer and more effi ciently, industrial plants across the globe are taking a more proactive approach by moving away from simply responding to the crisis of the day. Today, the
26 October 2021 | Automation
Left: Fluke 3563 combines a high-frequency piezoelectric sensor, two MEMS sensors and software
Below: Fluke 3562 uses thermoelectric or photovoltaic energy- harvesters with long-range sensor-to-gateway communication
immediate goal is to fi nd and fi x problems before there is a breakdown. The long-term goal is to drive business value.
Condition-based maintenance Monitoring and studying the trends of machine health are staples of predictive maintenance. However, condition-based maintenance (CBM) is a better term because no one can predict when a machine will fail. CBM uses machine condition data, contextual data, trends, analytics and knowledge of specifi c machines to determine how machines are performing. Wireless vibration sensors for vibration
screening and analysis are one of the most powerful ways to enact CBM. Monitors like the new Fluke 3563 vibration analysis sensor are attached to critical machines to track vibration data over time and identify faults. Using accelerometers, vibration monitors measure changes in the amplitude, frequency and intensity of vibration. When combined with the LIVE-Asset Portal software, teams can spot patterns, receive alerts about anomalies and compare measurements.
The Fluke 3562 is a batteryless sensor
that runs on power provided by either a thermoelectric or photovoltaic energy- harvester. The screening sensor collects snapshots of data, such as vibration levels, temperature and humidity, and trends the nine highest FFT peaks by magnitude. Taken together, vibration screening and analysis, combined with software, create a powerful condition-monitoring solution that detects if machines are functioning correctly.
CBM is based on machine condition data that can be read by condition-monitoring devices, or transmitted by sensors connected to the machine. The advantages of this approach include: �Always-on asset monitoring: When Internet-enabled devices are connected to software, measurements are automatically aggregated around the clock. Data is stored in the cloud, assigned to assets and organised for users to review. �Faster identifi cation of the root cause of a problem: Teams can swiftly troubleshoot assets using diff erent condition-monitoring devices, and compare measurements over time to quickly pinpoint anomalies. �Monitor equipment safely from anywhere: Wireless sensor measurements are automatically sent to the cloud without human intervention, enabling teams to access data remotely on smart devices. It is not surprising that Gartner estimates decision automation in the form of predictive maintenance – and CBM – will generate the highest business value for organisations with heavy assets in 2022.
CONTACT:
Fluke
www.fluke.com
automationmagazine.co.uk
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