INTEGRATED CONDITION MONITORING

Integrated Condition Monitoring, selecting the best technology

It has long been accepted that condition monitoring is the most effective and cost-efficient approach to maximizing the life of industrial machinery. Predictive maintenance using condition monitoring techniques detects the degradation of industrial assets with the goal of correcting faults before they generate significant deterioration in the component or equipment.

Different technologies for machine condition monitoring has advanced dramatically over the past decades and the diagnostic capabilities of predictive maintenance technologies have increased in recent years with theses advances, but only a combination of information will lead to an accurate diagnosis.

Why use different technologies?

Different predictive technologies (vibration, oil analysis, thermography, etc. ) are appropriated to determine the condition of different types of assets. Sometimes, some technologies reveal different information about the same equipment and sometimes they overlap the diagnosis, reinforcing indications seen in each technology.

For example, studying bearings health in rotating machinery, vibration analysis and oil analysis can detect most of the faults, some of faults are detected just from one technique and in other faults both techniques converge. The loss of either technology will reduce their detection resolution and their ability to control the root causes of machine failure.

Building bridges → integrated approach

In many industries, multiple techniques are implemented, usually combining external and internal services. It is well known that no one technology can give all answers. However, rarely different techniques are reviewed by the same personnel, even by the same department, remaining islands of knowledge. CM systems should mainly be implemented using an integrated approach, because no single technique can provide the comprehensive and reliable solutions needed by the industry. One or several of these monitoring technologies will detect the change and provide reliable diagnostics. All together, they paint a clearest picture of the asset condition.

In general, we can make the following these advises about combining predictive techniques in detecting and analyzing machine faults:

Each technology has its range of action and some faults can only be detected by using one specific technique.
Some techniques offer complementary strengths in controlling the root causes of machine failure and in identifying and understanding the nature of abnormal conditions. They are natural allies in achieving machine reliability and to discover the root causes of machine failure.
Often, one technique serves as the leading indicator of machine failure while the other(s) serves as the confirming indicator.
Success depends on using the more effective tools and knowlegde to diagnostic our assets.

Disadvantages of non-integrated strategy include:

Poor decision due to incomplete information
Pockets of knowlegde, ineffiencient and non-efective communications
Poor root analysis cause. Individual data are less clear than combined.

Types of assets and their applicable techniques

When these techniques are conducted independently, only a portion of machine faults are typically diagnosed. However, practical experience has shown that integrating these techniques in a machine condition-monitoring program provides greater and more reliable information, bringing significant cost benefits to industry. For example, in a gearbox inside our asset, we can detect a fractured gear tooth, using vibration and wear debris analyses. Usually, wear debris gives us clear symtoms of this type of failure, but if the size of the debris generated is so large, debris falls to the bottom, never finding its way into a sample bottle.

An integrated condition monitoring system

If all the information provided by the different techniques remains separate, the different specialist will need to have frequent meetings to share data and to arrive at a consensus. So in order to achieve fast integrated conclusions about the asset status, it's needed the use of an ultimate solution that help in:

Put our focus on the equipment that we are maintaining, holding all the key equipment data and all the reports for the different technologies applied.
Have up-to-date information.
Provide different levels of information, helping us to focus on the more important issues, it is needed to have fast access to summary information about the condition of the equipment, and to the diagnosis and recommendations without being confronted by raw data report.
Hold data from multiple vendors and services provider, including our own maintenance personnal.
Fast access and easy to use for people unfamiliar with computers, cloud-based solutions is recommended.
Support for finantial analysis, first to justify the existence and growing of CM program and second to justify individual recommendations.
Support for different technologies, focusing in the detected failures.
Provide a consistent hierarchy, letting us go from the big picture to the details, quickly when needed.

Advantages include:

User education: specialist will become multiskilled. User would be exposed to different technologies, becoming more familiar to all of them.
All diagnosis and recommendations would be more consistent, providing a place to argue and arrive to consesus.
All users would share a place to share and search for the key information.

Conclusions

Different technologies play an important role in assessment of equipment condition. Each plant needs to analyze and decide which techniques should be performed and what to do with the data. One of the keys to a successful predictive program is make it easy to access to the important actors to all this information together, so they can obtain the different right answers related with the asset health.

What does the future hold? Using an integrated CM platform, users will have access to expertise to understand the data available in the different technologies, becoming cross-technology experts. They will cooperate and diagnostics will arrive having into account multiple technology data, all system will be able to work together. Integrated system will come greater success in condition monitoring, bringing greater visibility and acceptance.

People most familiar with a technology can review the decisions made by more inexperienced users. Any user can become more experienced looking at any of the supporting data, and over time. And non specialists can look at information describing the severity of individual faults in the equipment, with the final diagnosis and recommendations.

In this article we will outline