Mission control
With constant pressure to increase productivity, condition monitoring technology is sure to become a vital tool in a plant engineer's portfolio. Mark Venables explains.
With growing integration between the control functions within production facilities and the manufacturing and enterprise systems that monitor them, plant engineers have more ways available with which to keep a check on the condition of machinery.
Monitoring increases overall knowledge of asset condition and allows condition-based maintenance (CBM) to be carried out by scheduling downtime, labour, and materials based on machinery health.
The benefits of a CBM programme are many, and they drive a variety of key performance indicators (KPI) by improving plant metrics, such as return on net assets (RONA), and lower inventory costs and increased overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).
There are many forms of condition monitoring (CM), from sensors for individual items of equipment such as bearings, motors or drives, to fully-integrated, plant-wide systems that monitor the condition of an entire factory or manufacturing process. And its utilisation is growing rapidly.
Electric motors is one area where
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