Preventive Maintenance, also known as planned maintenance, scheduled maintenance, calendar based maintenance, historical maintenance, etc. has its own set of pro’s and con’s. The theory is machinery has a life cycle. The probability of failure increases as the machine ages so maintenance needs to be performed prior to failure to extend its life and avoid…
Read More
In the current highly competitive global economy we live in, there is always a drive to get the competitive edge. One way is to develop a maintenance strategy that will improve safety, meet production goals, increase uptime, increase plant efficiency and thus increase plant profitability. There are four basic maintenance strategies: Breakdown Maintenance Preventive Maintenance…
Read More
As a technical trainer for VibrAlign, I do a lot of reading in order to hopefully continuously improve. I am also very curious. Quite often I run across articles I believe are worth sharing. This article was on LinkedIn, an IDCON reliability and maintenance discussion written by Mr. Ken Latino. In case you have not…
Read More
Resonance is when a force causes an object to “resonate”, due to excitation of its natural frequency. Think of a machine coasting down to a stop. There are certain speeds in coasting down that excite natural frequencies of the machine components. This is often observed in the coast down of a bench grinder. As the…
Read More
As my grandma used to say, “When you don’t know how to use your head, you’d better know how to use your legs”. Thanks to a feature on our FALCON data collector I didn’t have to call her to tell her how right she was (again)! Two of us were performing data collection on a…
Read More
Mechanical looseness is a very common machine vibration diagnosis. It is often overused-becoming a “catch all” category for undiagnosed vibration. It can be caused by a multitude of things that may seem to have no relationship to each other, such as: Loose bolting Coupling looseness or backlash Belts Too Loose Cracked welds Improper bearing…
Read More
This is a subject that comes up relatively frequently with our customers and observations from the field. The purpose of today’s blog post is to illustrate what can and often does happen. While misalignment can and does present with easily identifiable vibration signals; often it does not. Misalignment may be present in a machine, developing…
Read More
Although shaft distortion due to misalignment affects more than just the electric motor, here are a few things that are a telltale signs you may have an alignment issue. In a perfectly straight shaft, the centers of each shaft cross-section from end-to-end of the shaft lie on a straight line. A shaft is bent if…
Read More
In industrial machinery, the centerpiece of vibration analysis is the ability to detect bearing problems BEFORE the bearing fails. Even more beneficial is detecting the root cause of a bearing problem before damage is done. The bearing really is the heart of the rotating machine. There’s a plethora of bearing types and designs. There…
Read More
I have been in industrial maintenance longer than I have not. A portion of that time was spent in Maintenance Management. One lesson I learned was, that in order for a team leader (or company as a whole) to be successful, the entire team needs to be successful. I tend to simplify things, maybe to…
Read MoreUnbalance is another common machinery vibration problem. Unbalance is the uneven distribution of mass around a rotating axis. Any rotating machine can have an unbalance problem, not just fans. It is important to note that once rotating machinery components are balanced, they should stay balanced until something changes. These changes are normally: Dirt, paint, or…
Read MoreVibrAlign, Inc., exclusive US distributor of FIXTURLASER brand alignment products, is proud to announce a major expansion to its product offerings; the ONEPROD line of integrated condition monitoring products, developed by VibrAlign’s new parent company, ACOEM S.A. The ONEPROD brand, which includes the HAWK, FALCON, EAGLE, MVX, and NEST, is designed to both fill gaps…
Read More
If you’re working to maintain machines, Acoem USA wants to help.
We’re committed to providing tools, training, and services that will transform your approach to maintenance and reliability.
