NEW PERSPECTIVES: PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE OF ROTATING EQUIPMENT R
otating equipment is central to industrial production and manufacturing. That’s why reliability is essential. To ensure reliability, operators of rotating equipment seek to keep factors like alignment and balance at peak potential. But constant stress on machinery components poses the continual threat of failure and unwanted downtime. Considering the variety of pressure points and torsional stress points at every connection in a piece of rotating equipment, it comes as little surprise that proper maintenance is priority number one to keeping runtimes steady and uninterrupted. With high pressure and intense rotational power at the core of these technologies, stress points are focused on the seals, belts, brakes, and bearings that connect the moving parts of a rotating machinery asset.
The Status Quo In general, there are three main strategies or philosophies about maintaining equipment assets: reactive, preventative, and predictive. Reactive maintenance, the earliest and most basic form, is the ‘strategy of reaction’ or deciding to repair or replace a part only after it has broken or become worn down to the point of failure. Unfortunately, this strategy often leads to service providers focusing on fixing symptoms rather than addressing the core problem itself. This can mean that a part is repeatedly replaced or repaired after being 14 Industry Europe
worn down when the root cause could have been identified and managed before the endless repair loop started. Preventive maintenance (sometimes called ‘planned maintenance’) describes the strategy of implementing scheduled service tasks over a defined period while the equipment is still in regular operation to avoid unexpected part breakdowns (and their extra costs) over the lifetime of a piece of equipment. Equipment assets are temporarily taken offline at predefined time intervals where predefined maintenance and replacement tasks are carried out. Studies show that preventive strategies can provide 12-18% cost savings on average compared to reactive strategies.
The Way Ahead Is preventive maintenance the most efficient approach to keep rotating equipment at peak performance? Measurements of alignment, balance, vibration, lubrication, temperature, and shock are among the most important numbers to monitor to prevent unnecessary breakdowns. Sensors could be used along the production chain to monitor these numbers. The more sophisticated the system, the earlier that potential problem areas can be isolated and corrected before more costly damage occurs. The next generation of condition monitoring goes beyond ‘preventing’ failures to ‘predicting’ failures. It takes advantage of modern
