Predictive Maintenance with vibration-based condition monitoring
As everyone who works with machinery knows, maintenance is one of those things that simply comes along with the job. In the past, maintenance often involved fixing equipment as quickly as possible when it broke and performing routine maintenance in-between to hopefully correct issues before they became serious.
That world of maintenance is full of wasted time and money.
Routine maintenance and preventative maintenance are an important part of taking proper care of your machines. However, the real money-saver is predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance allows you to catch issues in their beginning stages, before they cause problems, and fix equipment when it’s needed with little to no downtime.
What makes predictive maintenance so powerful is the ability to schedule your machine’s operation. You know beforehand that your machine is going to need maintenance, so you can order parts and schedule it to a time that’s convenient for the company instead of having to do everything in a rush after a catastrophic failure.
For one of our clients, the addition of our system brought their annual maintenance budget down from $400,000 to $80,000. Another of our clients told us that we’ve saved them over $7 million to date. Those are significant numbers for anyone.
Alright, we hear you thinking: Okay, so that’s great and all, but how do I do that for my company? The first step is simple: vibration-based machine condition monitoring.
The Machine Doctors
What is vibration-based machine condition monitoring? Think of it like this: we’re a machine doctor. Doctors and dentists use stethoscopes, blood pressure monitors, x-rays, and more to check up on your health as a human. Our vibration testing and analytical tools are like that for a machine.
Our systems look inside the machine for any “clogged arteries,” “plaque,” “cancerous cells,” or “broken teeth” and let you know when it finds anything that is affecting the overall health of the machine. That way, you know preemptively that you need to fix your machine before it has a complete breakdown.
How do our systems do that? Each machine gives off a resonate vibration. It has one that it gives off when it’s healthy, and another when it’s not. To determine what the vibration of the machine is when it is healthy, we measure what is called a baseline. Then we leave our system on the machine and when it starts to “get sick,” its baseline changes and we know that its health is changing. Once the machine is repaired, we establish another baseline and the process repeats.
Testing and Analysis Options
We offer three levels of vibration analysis for companies to choose from, based on their current needs, available personnel, and preferences. We also have available several options of vibration testing tools to satisfy your company’s needs (for more details on our VBox family of vibration sensors, click here to visit our product pages).
Option 1 includes a permanent installation of one of our VBox systems on your machine, that you monitor. All data goes directly to you, where you then process and analyze your own data and reports.
Option 2 includes a permanent installation of one of our VBox systems on your machine, that you monitor. You collect the data and send it to us for analysis.
Option 3 includes a permanent installation of one of our VBox systems on your machine, that we monitor. Our service technicians come on site to collect the data, process and analyze the data, and provide you with a report.
Conclusion
For more detailed information on how our predictive maintenance program can benefit your company, contact us today and one of our representatives will assist you.
Our engineers have spent years in the field performing vibrations-based machine condition monitoring. We started this blog so that you can tap into their knowledge and get answers regarding vibration sensors, our products and services, how we compare to similar products on the market, maintenance tips, and more…but we’re just getting started. If you have any specific questions you’d like addressed as we build up this resource, we’d love to hear about it! Contact us here or send us a message on LinkedIn.
