Reliable Plant, August 2010

Traditionally, plumbness measurements on a vertical hydro-turbine/generator shaft involved stringing a series of wires along the length of the shaft, attaching a weight to the end of the wires and then measuring the space from the wire to the shaft using an electronic micrometer. Although this method was inexpensive and has been used for many years, it did require access to a long length of the shaft to achieve an accurate resolution. Also, measurements involve physically measuring the distance between the wire and the shaft at various elevations on the shaft, increasing the amount of time and personnel requirement for the measurement.

Ludeca Inc. presents its experience with a laser-based system which replaces the time-consuming wire method. Measurements now can be performed in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take with the wire measurement method. Ludeca’s measurement system, known as the PERMAPLUMB, uses a self-adjusting mechanical mirror, always plumb to earth, that reflects a Class 1 laser beam into a detector. It requires only 14 inches of axial space along the shaft. The mirror and transducer are attached by a bracket that uses magnets on the turbine shaft. From a single 270-degree shaft rotation, the system calculates and displays angularity and corrective moves and provides a statistical quality measurement of the data. A “move” function allows monitoring of corrections as they are being made. The resolution is better than 0.00002 inch per foot, which is more accurate than required by NEMA. Adjacent turbines also can continue to operate since the system is insensitive to vibration.

Read article: How to achieve vertical shaft plumbness using laser alignment

Pumps & Systems, August 2010

Frequency analysis is an important method of vibration analysis. It provides information on vibration sources and helps identify those components in the vibration signal that are often small, but nevertheless important, for diagnosis. Each vibration can be attributed to a particular excitation source or machine part.

Read entire article: Basic Rules for Measuring Frequency Spectra

YOU’RE INVITED!
The future Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals East Tennessee Chapter

Plan to attend this very exciting and important first ever meeting of the future SMRP East Tennessee Chapter.

Greater East TN SMRP Chapter Interest Meeting
Thursday, September 16, 2010
11 AM to 3 PM

Speakers:
Ron Moore
Claudia Faye

Location Address
AESSEAL, Inc.
Stock Creek Development Center
355 Dunavant Drive
Rockford, TN 37853

RSVP to:
Tammi Pickett
tpickett@peopleandprocesses.com
843-814-3795

Not later than Friday, September 10, 2010

This meeting is FREE, and you don’t need to be a member of SMRP to attend.

After affiliating with SMRP officially, we will hold regular meetings that will deliver to you:

Networking and Sharing Best Practices

• Best Practices Reliability and Maintenance Workshops
• Expert Industry Speakers
• Plant Tours

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg….

LUDECA and PIONEER ENGINEERING invite you to join our upcoming webinar: “Effective Defect Analysis: Maximizing your Vibration Setup”

This presentation by Mitch Stansloski will discuss setting highly effective collection specifications, as well as determining the appropriate collection interval for several applications.

Whether you are a beginner or advanced vibration professional, attend this free webinar to learn more about:

• How to set appropriate frequency ranges, averages, and resolution in order to avoid misdiagnosing malfunctions that could be very straightforward.
• How to establish the appropriate collection interval which varies as a function of shaft turning speed, duty cycle, and load.
• The new VIBXPERT II vibration analyzer and OMNITREND software will be used to present real case studies to demonstrate these concepts.

Missed vibration conditioning monitoring data can never be recovered. All too often either insufficient data is collected, or data is collected at an ineffective interval. Then when crucial trend information is needed, accurate analysis is difficult at best.

Date: August 31, 2010

Time: 1:00 – 2:00 PM ESD

Space is limited
REGISTER NOW

Hosted by LUDECA and PIONEER ENGINEERING in collaboration with Reliabilityweb.com

After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Webinar and system requirements.

July 2010 · IMPO Magazine

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Mahatma Gandhi

Investing in more efficient process machinery makes good business sense and will help to ensure reduced costs plus a greener plant. However, not all plants can afford to replace their present equipment with newer, more efficient machines. What steps can these plants take to “green up” their business and operate more efficiently? Most plants can vastly improve machine reliability, efficiency, and reduce raw materials conversion costs by simply making improvements in their present machinery. This can be done through precision maintenance practices and defect elimination. A good PdM (predictive maintenance) process will help to achieve these goals.

Read entire article: Save Some Green: Green Up Your Machines

Join us at the RELIABLE PLANT 2010 Conference and save $100 with our exhibitor’s discount. Get Discount Code

August 31- September 2
Nashville Convention Center, Nashville, TN
Visit LUDECA at Booth#531
Request  Free Show Pass to Exhibit Hall and attend a Free Learning Session

Attend our session: “Identification of Lubrication Issues with Vibration Analysis” by our training partner Mitch Stansloski – Pioneer Engineering

Establishing a lubrication program is difficult at best especially when considering varying recommendations from lubricant suppliers and original equipment manufacturers.  Add to these the wide variety of operating context, warranty requirements and loading conditions, and creating an efficient program is challenging.  Vibration analysis is a condition monitoring tool that can be used to eliminate much of this guesswork.  A variety of techniques designed to identify lubrication issues will be presented, including Shock Pulse and high frequency demodulated acceleration measurements.  Supportive case studies will be included. 

September 1 at 9:00am

Register Now

Photos courtesy of Solutia

Problem:
Our boiler feed water pump running on steam turbine kept failing numerous mechanical seals since 2006, and gave us very poor reliability. Due to the unreliable nature of the steam turbine, we had to keep running our electric boiler feed water pump as a primary pump. This cost us $$$ in terms of energy usage, as we were not able to use steam generated by our boiler to power the steam turbine pump.

Solution:
In February 2010, we ordered a new rotating assembly for the steam turbine pump and installed it. We also purchased a new laser shaft alignment system “OPTALIGN SMART”. We had stopped laser aligning our equipment for the last couple of years due to the old laser alignment system not being calibrated and not being very user friendly. After seeing a hands-on demonstration of the OPTALIGN SMART, our skilled trade group was convinced that we needed this new user friendly system for laser shaft alignments.
Upon laser aligning the steam turbine, we found that we were way off in both Horizontal and Vertical alignment. Using the OPTALIGN SMART, we were able to achieve a much better alignment than we ever did. We did not get the “smiley” faces on our alignment, but that was due to having tremendous amount of pipe strain, poor base condition and being bolt-bound. However, our steam turbine has been running smoothly without any issues since February 2010. According to some operators, the steam turbine has never run this quiet and long in the past.
We have started using the OPTALIGN SMART laser shaft alignment tool on all our rotating equipment, and already seen some really good results and overall cost savings in maintenance labor and materials.

Nihal Raval
Maintenance/Reliability Engineer
SOLUTIA

The biggest contribution one can make to lower the operating costs of rotating systems is to align them correctly using the real coupling target values. Target values recommended by manufacturers do not always reflect the real machine centerline movements due to thermal growth, pipe strain and dynamic factors. The new ROTALIGN ULTRA Live Trend, a short term continuous monitoring application, helps to exactly determine the relative positional changes between coupled machines during start-up or shut-down. By applying these values, the machines are precisely aligned to reflect normal operating conditions. In addition, Live Trend allows you to establish a trend of the events that influenced such positional changes. With Live Trend you can also monitor pipe growth and any other machine components over time.

Rotalign Ultra Live Trend Results - Plot

Rotalign Ultra Live Trend Results - Live

This means:

• Lower energy costs through reduced power consumption
• Increased mechanical life of bearings, seals, shafts and couplings
• Reduced bearing and coupling temperatures
• Minimized breaking or cracking of shafts
• Reduced vibration
• Reduced machine damage

Reliability starts with precision shaft alignment!

The following situation occurred at a Municipal Power Plant. During a planned outage, the on-site team was utilizing a Rotalign Pro with Boralign to assess the position of the bearing bores after removal of the rotor on an Allis Chalmers power generation steam turbine. The results were varying far more than normal and the customer wanted to understand why.

I was called in to make sure there were no errors in the use of the Boralign system. The tool was being used properly and there were no problems with the tooling. The customer had already set the unit up on a surface plate and established that there was no appreciable drift with the tool.

I suspected excessive vibration, so I used my Vibscanner to measure overall vibration in displacement. No significant level of vibration could be detected; certainly not enough energy to cause the level of non-repeatability they had been observing in the readings.

I thought if the movement of the lower shells had a very low frequency that was too slow to measure utilizing traditional vibration sensors and methods, I might be able to measure it with the Rotalign Pro Straightness program. Both the laser and receiver were mounted on standard magnetic dial stands with the brackets that are part of the Straightness hardware set. A series of points were established on the lower shells to measure between, both along the rotational axis and from side to side. Setting the Rotalign Pro Straightness program to the shortest sample time and observing the X axis values over a 2 to 4 minute period, I was actually able to see a very slow movement between various points on the lower shells.

While some areas of the lower shells were reasonably stable, there was movement between some points that was as much as .024”, but at a very low CPM. While this process was somewhat like ODS, there was no real time phase data, so I could not tell how the various points were moving relative to each other. It was still very helpful to the rotating engineer to understand how much the various areas were moving. Better yet, with a fairly simple program and only 6 hours invested in collecting the data, the rotating engineer had a good idea of the magnitude of the problem.

July 2010 · Maintenance Technology Magazine

Properly maintained V-belt drives can be up to 97% efficient. Poorly operating belt drives can waste as much as 10% additional input power. Let’s consider a scenario that ignores motor losses and only considers losses in the belt drive. With electricity costs of seven cents per kWh, a rotor operating three shifts per day, five days per week and requiring 50 horsepower from a belt drive would consume over $16,000 of power annually. An additional drop in efficiency of only 5% would result in increased costs of over $800 per year. In some industries, such belt drives may comprise more than 50% of the total drive population. This example clearly shows that big savings can be realized by properly maintaining them.

Read entire article: Maintaining Belt Drives For Maximum Savings