Ways to save industrial energy with good training in predictive maintenance and alignment

If you are aware of the importance of predictive maintenance and alignment, then you should know that there are several effective ways to save industrial energy, provided that your staff receive proper training in predictive maintenance and alignment.

In this article, we will explain how you can specialise your team of operators and maintenance technicians in this type of professional activity within the industrial sector of your business, so that they can acquire all the essential skills to manage predictive maintenance and machine alignment in your facility.

Predictive maintenance seeks to predict the condition of equipment based on physical or chemical variables. It involves diagnosing equipment to predict when it will fail and anticipating the failure by intervening before it occurs.

Your team of technicians must know how to perform each of the most important application techniques in an industrial plant: 

• Vibration analysis.
• Line-up.
• Balancing of machines.
• Lubricant analysis.
• Thermography.

If your technical team does not have the right training, despite your good intentions and efforts to achieve industrial energy savings and productivity, you will not achieve good results within the established timeframe. When they do not have the right training, the following happens:

• You will not be able to obtain feedback on the most frequent faults in your machine park.
• The diagnoses will be incorrect, so you will not be able to know for certain the cause of the faults.
• You will not reap the benefits of predictive maintenance.
• Your team will not know which tasks to start with and will be less efficient and less effective.
• The alienations will not reach the required tolerance levels and, therefore, you will not achieve the benefits of industrial energy savings, reduction in spare parts, failures, etc.
• You will not achieve the required reliability.
• You will not be able to take full advantage of the tools within the expected time frame, so your ROI will be lower and will take longer to achieve.
• They will act on the symptom and not on the cause.

A machine that is not aligned and where the conditions of its environment (damping, mechanical fastening and foundation) are not adequate will cause an increase in vibration and a significant increase in energy consumption. Proper alignment allows us to correct dynamic operational problems and thoroughly analyse environmental conditions in order to reduce consumption and achieve industrial energy savings of up to 10% on each machine. This is a clear situation with which you can justify investment in predictive maintenance.

Example of energy savings with good training in predictive maintenance and alignment

Let us consider the case of two identical pumping units, whose energy consumption was measured before and after shaft alignment. Each of the pumps was 75 HP, and consumption was measured before and after alignment at the same speeds. 

For the first pump, energy consumption decreased by 8% (5.7kWh) and for the second pump, energy consumption decreased by 2.5% (1.7kWh). In order to estimate industrial energy savings in terms of energy consumption costs, we need to make a couple of assumptions.

First, let us assume that these machines consume energy at a constant rate during 80% of the year. The second assumption is a rate of €0.10/kWh. With these assumptions, pump 1 had a cost saving of €3,994.56/year and pump 2 had a cost saving of €1,191.36/year. 

You may wonder where the difference lies. It lies in staff training and the quality of the equipment used. The staff working on pump 1 performed more precise alignment work than the team that aligned the second pump. The more accurate the measurement and alignment equipment, the better the results you will achieve. If you train your technical team properly, you will not leave money on the table and you will increase your ROI.

If you want to improve your technical team's knowledge, you should offer them training on measurement and alignment, using new technologies for this purpose, which will enable you to achieve significant industrial energy savings in the short term. Keep in mind that the more they know about the technology, the more they will get out of the measurement system on a daily basis. 

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