PdM and equipment reliability at Pump & Turbomachinery Symposia

At the Pump & Turbomachinery Symposia (http://pumpturbo.tamu.edu) in Houston, predictive maintenance technologies were everywhere. A couple of significant ones turned my head.

Preston Johnson, principal sales engineer, condition monitoring systems, at National Instruments (NI, www.ni.com) was demonstrating its NI InsightCM Enterprise. While NI has been in the condition monitoring market for 20 years, this new system was developed in partnership with some significant PdM technology companies and is integrated with NI’s CompactRIO with its open embedded architecture. Maintenance and control system integration just made another giant leap forward.

NI InsightCM Enterprise is a software solution for online condition monitoring. It acquires and analyzes sensory information, generates alarms, allows maintenance and reliability professionals to see and manage data. Here’s a link to NI’s downloadable PDF white paper on the new solution: http://www.ni.com/white-paper/52332/en/. The Enterprise suite was launched at NIWeek 2014 in Austin, Texas.

Thomas Hoenig, president of GTI Predictive Technology (www.gtipredictive.com), explained the company’s new wireless accelerometer that works in conjunction with its iPad Vibration Analyzer providing live, streaming waveform and spectrum data.

GTI engineered this product to be very versatile. It can be powered through a changeable battery or powered through the USB port. This design allows for users to permanently mount these accelerometers or for use as a more convenient and safer version of the wired version. The wireless accelerometer also includes a second input port that accepts either a tachometer or a second accelerometer. GTI felt it was important that wireless users had this expansion port to allow for balancing and other applications that required a second channel of input.

All of the ports on the accelerometer are waterproof, enabling it to be permanently mounted outside. The construction of the accelerometer also provides drop protection. Over the years GTI has developed a platform of different apps that work in conjunction with GTI’s iPad-enabled accelerometers and tachometers. During development, GTI wanted to ensure the product would work with all of those existing apps right out of the box. The wireless accelerometer is designed to enable things that weren’t possible with the wired version. A future update will enable users to name their accelerometers and quickly switch between different accelerometers. GTI wants to make vibration-route data collection as simple and easy as possible.