Editors’ note: Three years ago, Plant Services met veteran millwright and newly minted predictive maintenance technician Michael Macsisak (https://plnt.sv/1810-MM), and PS then caught up with him a year ago as he began work in mining (https://plnt.sv/1910-MM). Macsisak sat down recently with Plant Services Editor-in-Chief Thomas Wilk to look back at his work as a PdM specialist and look ahead at what’s next for our industry.
PS: The past couple of years, as you’ve matured as a reliability specialist, you’ve had increasingly bigger wins. What’s an especially memorable one?
MM: During my work in the mining industry, it was (one related to) the hoist, which is a main piece of equipment that transports ore up to get crushed. The bearing was failing and massively out of alignment. I can’t give you numbers, but I’d say I prevented four to five days of total unplanned downtime by finding the faults early. And it could have been longer depending on what all happened when something let loose.
PS: What combination of technologies did you use? What kind of data were you looking at to find that potential failure?
MM: I don’t believe in one; I use all of them. Oil analysis comes first, then I track and trend with vibration, ultrasound, and infrared. The thought process being that you find it first with ultrasound, and then vibration comes into play, and the third is IR. After IR, which detects heat, the next step is failure. The challenge is that failure could happen later or it could happen sooner. There’s no set way to tell with 100% accuracy: “This is really hot. It’s going to make it two days to failure.” That’s when you have to act. However, when a fault can be picked up with IR, something will fail, so you have to act sooner.
PS: In the case of the hoist, did IR pick up a fault whose emergence was imminent?
MM: Yes, the bearing was starting to heat up, but I caught it more with the vibration and the ultrasonic, and that put me on the path to track and trend. The whole point of this is to track and trend at least monthly, and in critical equipment, biweekly.
Without trending, you have no idea what happened or what’s going to happen, because you can’t watch stuff as it increasingly goes to fail. I set it up; I’m looking for bearing faults; I’m looking for an imbalance, alignment, I’m looking for all those things. Most of the equipment that fails, I’ll say 80% of the time it’s due to misalignment.
PS: When you saw this hoist failing, what was the data that caught your manager’s attention? Was it the IR data? Vibration data?