The Machine Health Checkup

Machines can be equipped with measuring devices to detect early signs of deterioration in numerous components. It provides warning to operator to prevent a lengthy and expensive disruption due to machine failure and downtime. This technique applied to machine plants in shop floor or remote area is termed as condition monitoring. Its intent is to provide technicians with regular updates on the health of machinery.

Trends can be recognized from collected data. These trends helps operator derive frequency of maintenance and predict the early signs of degradation. It would lead to an internal and expensive fault if such signs are ignored.

The extent to which condition monitoring is productive depends on multiple factors like strategy of the asset managers, suitability of the machine design, importance of machine assets in the operations system and other general record reliability. Therefore, it should be noted that all the machines may not require same type of sensors or analysis strategy, it varies from machine-to machine and industry to industry. But there sure can be some overlay with the measures available from digital numerical relay.

New generation software are used to fetch and store data and then analyze trends from these information. Health of the machinery can be and any alarmic conditions can be detected when monitored values exceed expected limits. It also caters technicians with early warnings and alerts of deterioration within one or more components of the machinery.

These whole process enable maintenance scheduling to correct the issues prior to machine failure. In other cases, the maintenance can be planned so as to suit the conditions of the machine and work load, on the condition that the rate of deterioration  is not really excessive.

As factory proprietors become more conscious of the expenses of unplanned machine downtime, electric supply networks are then utilized closest to the long period capacity and various automatic condition monitoring tools, the application of techniques like online condition monitoring is expected to grow.