Proactive maintenance depends upon gathering intelligence on operating machinery to detect faults in advance of failures. Collecting and analyzing data on parameters such as vibration and temperature that indicate the health of equipment ultimately can serve to promote machine reliability and availability, extend intervals for scheduled maintenance, and help decrease unplanned downtime and lost output due to compromised assets.
Over the years, advances in the design, function, performance and benefit/cost ratio of interrelated data collection, software analytics, monitoring and analysis technologies have bolstered our ability to capture, diagnose and trend information on the operating condition of machinery — and thus prevent failures and make timely fixes.
Serving as a pre-emptive line of defense for condition monitoring, sensors and compatible data-acquisition and monitoring tools illustrate how far the technology has come. The toolbox of industrial sensors — whether hard-wired or wireless online systems — now includes an increasing number of options. Monitoring systems and analysis techniques have benefited from similar strides.
To learn more about vibration, read “Shake Up Your Condition Monitoring” from Chemical Processing.