Feature: Industrial electronics Companies are moving to condition-


based maintenance – and this is why By Ankush Malhotra, President, Fluke Reliability


I


n today’s highly-competitive market, companies of all sizes are looking for ways to run a leaner and more efficient operation, and one way is an effective maintenance program that increases uptime, decreases


maintenance costs, reduces unplanned outages and extends assets’ longevity. Such a program must include a way


to collect and analyse data; for example, vibration matters wherever there are critical motors – and critical motors are found in just about every manufacturing plant and facility. Some of the frustrations with current


monitoring solutions include lack of high- precision, in-depth intelligence, time- consuming, complex installation and setup, limited diagnostic range and service offerings that increase the total cost of ownership. In addition, some condition-monitoring solutions don’t upscale well to handle multiple assets, leading to siloed approaches with limited fault detection. Wired and wireless sensors are oſten incompatible with plant network infrastructure, resulting in reams of unusable data.


Since predictive maintenance is


a means to operate safer and more efficiently, industrial plants across the globe are taking a more proactive approach, by moving away from simply responding to the crisis of the moment. Today, the immediate goal is to find and fix problems before breakdowns occur.


Value-add 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


Wireless vibration sensors with integrated software make it possible to detect and diagnose problems before they become severe


36 December 2021 /January 2022 www.electronicsworld.co.uk


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