Conditioning Monitoring of Rotating Equipment

Program Goals

Elimination of machine breakdowns.
Able to anticipate and accurately plan for maintenance needs.
To increase plant production readiness by significantly reducing the chance of a breakdown during operations
Reduced expenditures for spare parts and labor. Machines that fail while in service often cost ten times as much to repair than if the repair were anticipated and scheduled.
Predictive maintenance.

Major part of a pro-active program is root cause failure analysis, which is the determination of the mechanisms and causes of machine faults
Some of the root cause is misalignment, unbalance, or bearing defect.

Vibration can be considered to be the oscillation or repetitive motion of an object around an equilibrium position.
Vibration of an object is always caused by an excitation force. This force may be externally applied to the object, or it may originate inside the object.
Rate (frequency) and magnitude of the vibration of a given object is completely determined by the excitation force, direction, and frequency
Forces are dependent upon the machine condition, and knowledge of their characteristics and interactions allows one to diagnose a machine problem.