Maintaining your assets and ensuring that downtime is kept to a minimum is vital. Not only in terms of production, but repairs can be costly. Condition Monitoring is all about assessing machinery and equipment to provide data to prevent unexpected failure. Maintain’s reliability engineers have the experience and knowledge to understand the problem and provide the solution. Depending on the plant and the different processes involved, we apply different Condition Monitoring techniques.
Vibration is commonly detected in rotating equipment. Any changes or irregularities to the vibration signal can be measured and analysed to detect a variety of failure models. These include bearing problems, imbalance, misalignment, and mechanical looseness. If left undetected this could result in unexpected failure leading to unplanned downtime and expensive repairs.
Vibration analysis effectively monitors rotating equipment to identify poor running conditions including:
Thermal imaging is an incredible technique, which uses infrared technology to identify different temperatures. Our services can be used to identify many defects and faults, to improve efficiency.
Applications include:
Ultrasound is used for detecting slow moving bearing defects, air or gas leaks, lubrication issues, steam traps and valve passing.
Massive savings can be achieved by identifying air leaks and it can be used as an entry level condition monitoring. Ultrasound is very efficient for measuring lots of bearings quickly, such as those on conveyors.
Maintain’s condition-based lubrication monitoring uses our ‘Lubrication Factor’. We have specifically trialled readings in the field to come up with our own algorithm to detect all lubrication in a bearing. This innovative reading allows us to quickly identify poor lubrication status in just 11 seconds.
We provide an individual custom-built lubrication schedule, using lubricators made by leading brand Gruetzner, which is adjusted and tailored to your equipment.
The use of auto lubricators can be very beneficial in certain applications. Where factories would typically lubricate certain areas manually, we can now install smart lubricators to dispense the exact amount of grease required to lubricate the bearing. The smart lubricator can be connected to a variety of different electrical supplies to only lubricate when the machine is running. This reduces human error, and it can also reach assets that cannot be accessed by operators. This helps to prolong the life of the bearings.
Our Oil Sampling services are designed to save our customers money, by reducing the frequency of oil changes in their plant and equipment. Oil Sampling is a very effect way to assess oil condition. Where this is combined with wear particle analysis, it is an extremely effective tool for assessing gearbox conditions.
This includes:
Maintain’s Shaft Current Testing uses the industry’s best motor shaft grounding solution from Helwig to detect Shaft Currents and remedy the problem before it causes a bearing failure. This is a particular problem on inverter driven applications.
Shaft Current Testing is designed to detect shaft voltage that results in bearing failure due to EDM damage, and lubrication damage due to electrical discharge.
This testing is essential as it avoids one of the major causes of motor downtime and costly repairs on inverter driven applications.
Maintain’s Gas Imagery service detects gas leaks such as methane and ammonia. Safely detecting these leaks saves businesses money.
We have recently invested in a FLIR GF77, a new and ground-breaking gas imaging camera. This is used to detect methane, sulphur hexafluoride (SF6), ammonia and other has emissions.
This is a particular problem in the refrigeration / food industries (ammonia) and biogas plants (methane).
Maintain Reliability works closely with several wireless solution companies to help monitor a wide range of assets and parameters. We are able to offer several wireless solutions and will tailor the best system based on a customer’s application and budget.
Routine vibration analysis is very effective, but online monitoring allows us to monitor your assets more frequently. For highly critical equipment, where changes in speed torque or load could be a problem for routine analysis, online monitoring allows us to collect trend data and assess the condition of the machine more reliably and effectively.
Trend analysis is very important in process manufacturing load and speeds can change frequently. It can make traditional monthly monitoring difficult. This is where wireless monitoring comes into its own as it is very successful in identifying the speed and load trend on every reading.
Maintain Reliability carries out various condition monitoring services at PPG. This has proven to be incredibly successful.
Maintain are passionate about all things reliability. It is always a pleasure working together. We have been working with maintain to create are asset care program that allows us to effectively monitor are assets and improve plant performance.
Maintain have been outstanding with there work for Faerch. They have picked up issues long before they cause unnecessary downtime and saved us thousands with regular air leak surveys. The passion for condition monitoring is more than evident and highly contagious.
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