Vibration analysis to reduce operating costs

Vibration analysis to reduce operational costs is one of the most important industrial predictive maintenance technologies that improve your machines and plants which, of course, anticipate possible failures that could occur during plant operations.

Most machine failures, regardless of whether the failure is mechanical or electrical in nature, generate vibration at a specific frequency. This vibration can correspond to faults such as misalignment, cavitation, belt defects or loose belts, foundation or base looseness, bearing damage, gear damage and many other defects.

A vibration analysis programme to reduce operating costs allows a machine and its components to be inspected, through the study and calculation of frequencies in the vibration spectra, without the need to stop or dismantle it. This analysis helps to detect all these problems before failures occur.

It must be borne in mind that each component vibrates in a different way and generates a characteristic pattern, leaving a typical trace in the spectrum. If there is a deterioration, the pattern shows it from characteristic signals from the failure. This technology allows you to detect whether it is, for example, an imbalance, alignment failure or bearing damage. In addition to an accurate diagnosis, you can generally also specify whether you need to act quickly or can wait until the next scheduled overhaul.

There are other applications to reduce operating costs

But in addition to vibration analysis to reduce operating costs, another way to optimise machine operating costs is through machine re-engineering. It must be borne in mind that in the installations we can find machines that are poorly dimensioned and others that are oversized.

For the first case, the machines are working above their capacity and therefore recurrent failures occur and consume resources. When machines are oversized, there is a waste of money due to a lack of optimal productivity.

Another application, in addition to vibration analysis to reduce operating costs, is good maintainability, which also helps to reduce operating costs. For this, personnel must be trained to follow the right processes and criteria to ensure the best operation of the machine. Personnel must have the right tools to measure, correct and optimise operation. We are talking about tools that allow us to make decisions about re-engineering the machine.

In this blog, we have repeatedly discussed that, if there are recurring faults in a machine, maintenance managers through vibration analysis, alignment or balancing can give an insight into the operation of the machine and determine whether the machine is working optimally in terms of consumption of operating resources. A good way to start optimising operating costs is to implement a predictive maintenance plan.

With predictive maintenance, the conditions in which a piece of equipment is working and its behaviour in relation to a production process are monitored, in such a way that preventive intervention times can be established, avoiding unscheduled stoppages. Monitoring can be carried out using different techniques such as vibration analysis to reduce operating costs, thermography, passive ultrasound, electrical quality analysis and visual inspection, depending on the variables to be controlled in each machine.

Predictive maintenance seeks reliability management by carrying out a series of activities aimed at efficiently and timely managing the mechanical availability of equipment. These activities include the initial parameterisation of the equipment, measurements, data analysis, results reports, report support and periodic evaluations of the global impact of the management, generating economic and operational benefits.

The average cost reduction values for implementing predictive maintenance are as follows:

• Maintenance costs - below 50%.
• Reduction of unexpected failures - 55%.
• Equipment repair and overhaul times - less than 60%.
• Reduction of spare parts stock - 30%.
• Increased average machine uptime without downtime - 30%.
• Reduced energy costs per alignment - up to 10%.

On the other hand, there are also a number of intangible benefits, such as improved relations between maintenance and production staff, the peace of mind that comes with scheduled work and the consequent increase in the quality of the work, or the possible urgent tasks to be carried out during a normally non-working day.

Finally, training of staff to specialise in maintenance tasks and improve their skills will also help to reduce failures.

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