In a recent RT300 class during the field portion of the training, the team made the decision to take vibration readings on a motor/pump assembly that was very noisy and had frequent coupling failures. The RT300 diagnosed misalignment, cavitation and shock modulation. Then using the same RT300, they checked the alignment and it was indeed…
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By now, if you’ve kept up with the VibrAlign balancing “how-to” blogs, you should see that balancing is mostly just a math problem – counteracting forces. But we haven’t discussed when the balance job is through. When I started balancing fans many years ago, I stopped balancing when: The fan owner said, “that’s much better”,…
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How do you know if a bearing is about to fail? Bearings don’t last forever and can be damaged if proper precautions are not taken, so it’s important to know the signs of impending bearing failure. In this blog, we will go over the four stages of bearing failure and how this tends to show…
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Mechanical looseness is a common diagnosis in vibration analysis. You will certainly run into it when you are monitoring your machines if you haven’t already. However, did you know that there are three different types of mechanical looseness? Knowing which type of mechanical looseness you are dealing with is essential to providing the correct solution…
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Vibration analysis is a useful way to monitor machine health. Many plants have implemented regular vibration analysis plans to ensure the condition of their machines is being checked at regular intervals and so, if an issue comes to light after spectral analysis, a solution can be pursued. When analyzing vibration, it is important to…
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What is the difference between looseness and unbalance? They have very similar spectrums with different influencers. One can even impact the other in some situations. That similarity can impact your ability to balance a machine expeditiously in the field. For clarity of this discussion we will limit it to Type A and B mechanical…
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Unbalance and misalignment are problems that need to be addressed as soon as possible, but before you can begin to fix them, first you need to know how to find them on a spectrum. We will go over this below. For example, with a fan, unbalance appears on the spectrum as a higher than…
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One key bit of data required when collecting data or analyzing it is accurately pinpointing the RPM. When we set up schematics in the Machine Set Up module we tell the software what the RPM is here. When setting up a machine in the Nest you can choose either fixed speed, variable speed with keyboard,…
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From time to time, when performing route-based vibration analysis, you run across situations where access is limited to a data collection point. For example, this large pump below. Climbing up a structure to collect vibration data is unsafe and keeping a ladder stationed nearby can cause headaches as well. A simple solution is to permanently…
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Sometimes machines need to be added to a route that is already established. This is quite easy to do in the Nest. After you have collected all the pertinent information including machine name, RPM and horsepower (at a minimum) go into your Nest home screen and select “set up machine”. Once into machine set up…
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As you may have noticed if you follow VibrAlign’s social media accounts, we have been going through “Maintenance Tip Mondays” for the past couple months. This is a fun opportunity to hear from our experienced technical trainers as they share the top tips and tricks they have learned over the years in the field and…
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Taking the ONEPROD Falcon to the field is a big part of the 2-day training we provide on our entire Falcon line of condition monitoring tools. When we go to the field we always find interesting issues to analyze and discuss. A recent check of a centrifugal pump yielded one of those issues. The pump…
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A common vibration signature on equipment is looseness. There are two types of looseness: structural/fastener, fit between rotating components. For this discussion, we will focus on structural and fastener looseness. Typically, it is highly directional, occurs at 1xRPM, and will look similar to this spectrum. In this case, the vibration was confined to the vertical…
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Accelerometers by nature are sensitive tools. This sensitivity is heavily influenced by how the sensor is mounted. Standard accelerometers are mounted several ways based on need and application. Typical route-based data collecting will be done with a rare earth magnet. The magnet can be either flat or a two-pole type. This provides good data with…
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At the wrap up of a recent Hawk/SMC class the discussion was around what rotating assets to collect vibration data on going forward. The conversation quickly turned to a few keys assets that had the ability to impact large percentages of the downstream processes. The area technicians said that even though the machine was very…
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