Top 3 diagnostic challenges solved with condition monitoring
Quite often, critical equipment in commercial and industrial settings display symptoms that indicate a future failure. But those indications can go undetected due to shrinking budgets and limited personnel on-site to monitor machines. That’s where condition monitoring can help.
Modern condition monitoring systems are changing the way the industrial world performs maintenance activities with wireless sensors and cloud-based software. This technology offers an affordable way for teams to continuously monitor assets so they can log vibration,electrical, and/or temperature data from anywhere in a facility.
Here are three ways condition monitoring can help solve common diagnostic challenges:
1. Unexpected equipment failures
Without condition monitoring, teams rely on manual checks and periodic data collection to track asset health. This might be adequate for seasonal or infrequently used equipment, but for critical assets, it can lead to catastrophic outages and costly repairs.
Most commercial and industrial equipment failures are preceded by a change in machine vibration, temperature, or electrical performance that is visible in asset data. That’s why condition monitoring is such a valuable approach: it allows you to catch impending failures before they happen. Sensors installed on or near each critical asset transmit condition data to a software system that captures this information for analysis. Once you establish a baseline for each asset’s health, you can see when levels shift, indicating an impending failure.
With constant machine monitoring in place, your maintenance team will know exactly when to act to prevent downtime. Software like a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) can even track your equipment monitoring data and set automatic work orders when vibration levels meet preset thresholds. That way, your team knows exactly what needs to get done and when.
Condition monitoring equipment logs measurements 24/7, so there’s no need for frequent manual checks. Your team can focus their attention on other projects instead of spending valuable time investigating machines that may be perfectly healthy. With a machine health monitoring system in place, you can streamline your preventive maintenance program, prevent downtime, and save money in the long run.
2. Limited insight into asset health
It’s possible to track and trend asset health data over time from periodic manual inspections. However, you won’t get very far predicting failures or detecting changes in performance unless you have months-to-years’ worth of data. No maintenance team can wait that long when uptime is on the line.
Doing things manually can lead to fragmented and incomplete records, which won’t yield accurate health insights. If you work across locations, there’s also a good chance that data will become siloed in individual site-based systems. But condition monitoring, which employs a network of wireless sensors and cloud-based software, can connect an entire company’s asset data into one centralized system that teams can access from anywhere.
With sensors running around the clock, you can remotely capture baseline data on normal equipment performance in just a few days or weeks. Then, your team can use condition monitoring software to analyze performance trends over time and get a better picture of asset health. With insights in their pocket, maintenance staff will know when a piece of equipment lags behind or changes its operating performance, which can signal the need for maintenance before a breakdown happens.
Remote equipment monitoring is especially valuable for assets that are difficult to inspect, such as those located in distant, hard-to-reach, or dangerous locations. Once you install a sensor, it transmits data continuously without the need for human intervention. You can fill data gaps with machine condition monitoring thanks to its innate connectivity.
3. Misunderstanding the root causes of downtime
When breakdowns happen, it might not immediately be obvious why a machine failed. And when teams are under pressure to restore critical assets, they may not have time to thoroughly investigate the root cause. This can result in misunderstandings and inaccurate data that make it difficult to predict downtime in the future.
Condition monitoring helps fill information gaps without requiring extra time for manual inspections. With sensors constantly feeding a stream of data into a condition monitoring program, information on vibration, temperature, or power levels is readily available. After a breakdown happens, your team can analyze the data to find the root causes of failure and plan for next time.
Additionally, condition monitoring offers an easy-to-install, scalable solution as an alternative to fixed sensors. Some fixed sensors require a sizable investment in design, engineering and IT, and retrofitting can be cost prohibitive for less-critical equipment. Whether by taking simple electrical and temperature measurements or power monitoring, modern condition monitoring systems are designed to deliver the equipment insight you need when you need it.