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Condition monitoring under control

By Richard Schiltz

PlantServices.com

Building vibration analysis into the control system boosts efficiency and productivity.

If you polled manufacturers, seven out of 10 would tell you they’re interested in using predictive maintenance technologies in their plant floor automation systems to help machinery run productively and to help detect potential equipment failures. Yet, only three out of 10 have actually deployed this technology. Why the disparity?

The main reason is that most manufacturers lean on both operations and maintenance departments to collect equipment performance data, prioritize issues and decide on a course of action. When the recommendations don’t match, confusion and disagreements between those departments abound. The traditional approach to deploying predictive maintenance technologies also can be too difficult or expensive to be widely adopted.

But, by using condition monitoring and vibration analysis systems that are directly integrated into the control system, manufacturers can take an operations-driven approach to machine maintenance to help increase productivity while reducing costs.

http://www.plantservices.com/articles/2008/190.htm