It is highly common to conduct health monitoring and frequent condition monitoring on machines and plant where the outage cost is on rise. It can leads to further anticipation of failures and repairs are scheduled for production losses, in addition it keeps away any hassles of unnecessary periodic maintenance. 

It can be as basic as a man visiting the plant at consistent interims with portable instruments, for example, a thermal imaging camera and vibration analyzer, or it may be opted for installation in order for the data to be accumulated over a span of time. The information we investigated off-line and trends are detected.

With the expanding utilization of intelligent devices on hardware and plant, which can be networked and their information are accumulated remotely at minimal price; the opportunity of plant monitoring is expanding rapidly. There is a lot of data accessible on the web that provides new insights and offers products for monitoring. The article provides information regarding range of techniques and its incorporation with range of variable speed drives that help to gain access to useful data.

In general, it’s imperative to use sensors of minimal cost in range of techniques. These are non-intrusive and help to curb any cost of damage made during the installation process.

For instance, an accelerometer can effectively be mounted on a bearing support or machine hosting to gauge spiral vibration from a rotating machine, and it can recognize defaults which cause unbalanced force, for example, broken rotating parts, split shafts and misaligned coupling.

A simple measurement of amplitude gives general warning of potentially damaging defect, while a more profound recurrence investigation might have the capacity to focus specifically on various parts particularly if there is a diverse rotational speed required as in gearbox or belt drives.

VARIABLE SPEED DRIVE AND PLANT MAINTENANCE

The variable speed drives hold a crucial position in any machine, since it usually provides the motive power. It is a smart device which is closely coupled to the other automotive parts of a machine through the electric motor.

The drive comprises of its own internal sensors for various internal temperatures and the motor current, these are offered by various manufacturers in order to prevent any damages made to the drive or motor due to abnormal conditions. It may also have a motor temperature sensor connected.

In order to measure motor torque traditionally, the transducer is most commonly installed on a strain gauge or load cell to fix motor housing.

It is even more greatly difficult to measure the actual dynamic shaft torque, since its prerequisite for rotating strain gauge to be fixed to a shaft, with telemetry to transfer their data to a specific side.

The drive however has internal data for the torque-producing current in the motor, which is a good proxy for the shaft torque, available at no cost! The data is even available when the motor itself is inaccessible, whether deep inside a machine or under water or in a hazardous area The real-time torque data can be smoothed to deliver a running average value when the drive is active, or the peak value can be captured on a timescale chosen to suit the application, this could be anything from milliseconds to days depending on the process The drive also provides valuable data, especially the dynamic torque data and designers of machines that help to apply these ideas into array of applications.

The drive however has internal data for the torque-producing current in the motor, which is a good proxy for the shaft torque, available at no cost! The data is even available when the motor itself is inaccessible, whether deep inside a machine or under water or in a hazardous area.

The real-time torque data can be smoothed to deliver a running average value when the drive is active, or the peak value can be captured on a timescale chosen to suit the application, this could be anything from milliseconds to days depending on the process.

The drive also provides valuable data, especially the dynamic torque data and designers of machines that help to apply these ideas into array of applications.