The reprint excerpt below is from a case analysis of a cogeneration facility. The original article was authored by Allen Bailey and subsequently published in Uptime Magazine April/May 2016.
In today’s industrial environment, most turbomachinery has permanently installed machinery protection systems that incorporate vibration monitoring instrumentation. These systems typically utilize proximity probes to monitor both radial and thrust events (i.e., relative vibration measurements), case-mounted seismic vibration transducers (i.e., absolute vibration measurements) and a shaft speed/phase reference measurement. By incorporating the pre-existing machinery protection systems’ available measurement types into a routine vibration analysis program, technicians can determine specific fault types and machine condition based on signal amplitudes, frequency content and phase relationships between machine components. Additionally, these measurements can be acquired for machine commissioning purposes after mechanical repairs/inspections and utilized for machinery diagnostics with the use of multi-channel transient vibration analysis techniques.
Machinery protection systems offer much-needed protection for today’s turbomachinery by aiding in automatic machine shutdowns or providing plant operations with feedback on events occurring at the machine level that require immediate attention. However, these systems are not typically suitable as a sole means for predictive maintenance on a machine with regard to its reliability. Ideally, these machines need to have routine vibration analysis data collected on them by competent technicians who can detect faults in the system prior to events becoming detrimental to a machine’s health or affecting its reliability.
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Source: https://reliabilityweb.com/uptime