Vibration in industrial equipment can be a cause of potential problems in hardware and unexpected downtimes. When vibration increases, the risk of your machine developing problems also increases. To help identify possible issues in your industrial machinery before they strike, one of the methods is to evaluate vibration levels. This post digs deeper into vibration analysis to help you understand what it is, how it works, and the key benefits.

What is Vibration Analysis?

A number of factors can cause vibration in industrial machinery, but the most common are imbalance, wear, looseness, and misalignment. For example, a heavy spot can result in vibrations when an unbalanced shaft rotates on the machine axis, generating centrifugal forces.

Vibration analysis is a method of predictive maintenance that collects vibrations in rotating equipment, such as pumps, mixers, and motors, and evaluates them against known levels to identify potential failure points. Its ability to help predict potential failure makes it an excellent tool for planning maintenance and boosting equipment performance.

How Does Vibration Analysis Work?

Vibrations analysis is done using sensors that are fitted in rotating equipment. The sensors help to detect frequencies and types of vibration, while assessing velocity, displacement, and acceleration on all axes of a machine. By using a vibration analyzer, the information is analyzed and then compared against know red vibration signatures. The data is also compared against the known historical performance of the selected equipment.

When selecting the equipment analyzer to use, it is important to appreciate that they differ depending on equipment. Therefore, you should insist on the model that is suited for your specific equipment. For example, is your equipment a pump, compressor, or fan?

By detecting abnormal operations in your equipment, preventive maintenance can be initiated to help to avoid major breakdowns. If you are following the reactive maintenance model, issues such as part errors and unacceptable tolerances would have already happened when they are dealt with. This implies that parts would have to be reworked/ discarded, excess scrap created, and turn-around time delayed so much. In many cases, these issues mean huge losses.

Special Benefits of Vibration Analysis

Although vibration analysis means that you are adding another cost to your operations, the pros surpass the cons by a huge margin. Look – it is true that you will incur some costs to identify the issues in your equipment, but rectifying them right away means you will avoid more expensive downtime. Therefore, it will be a good idea to use vibration analysis as opposed to waiting for a disaster. Other benefits of using vibration analysis include:

• It helps to improve the reliability of machines.
• Eliminating wastes associated with unplanned repairs.
• You are able to deliver products on time with reliable equipment.
• You can easily identify the causes of problems in your machinery.
• A good way to cut the cost of maintenance.
• Improved productivity and cutting down emissions.
• Makes it easy to plan for your production more effectively.

If your facility involves using heavy industrial equipment, from drills to conveyor belts and lathe machines, it is crucial to carry occasional vibration analysis. As we have demonstrated in this post, the analysis can help you to identify issues early enough and rectify them before the problem escalates to expensive downtimes. This makes it a great tool for production optimization.