Improve Your Shutdown Success - an Introduction to Online Condition Monitoring

To monitor and increase the efficiency of a plant or production line, to reduce maintenance costs, downtime and extend the lifetime of critical machines, online machine Condition Monitoring is essential these days. There are several different maintenance strategies such as corrective, preventive and predictive maintenance. What are the technical differences and how do they work in the long term? This paper will explain the benefits of Condition Monitoring and why it is not enough to monitor and measure only the overall vibrations or bearing temperature of a machine. What is really necessary to get early fault detection and which diagnostic tools are available to monitor smallest changes of a machine condition nowadays? A case study of an impeller crack will demonstrate why online Condition Monitoring is so important, how machines can be protected against catastrophic failures and to reduce the amount of spare parts at the same time. This paper also gives an outlook of the potential failure modes, what can go wrong on different machine types and how to increase the chance of success in detecting and capturing all possible machine failures in an early stage. Finally, beside all the technical advantages we will demonstrate what costs are involved and what the savings are in using Condition Monitoring for critical machines over a period of time.