Smith Pump Company recently was called to a pump station to solve a problem with high vibration on three 350HP vertical turbine pumps. The pump station was fairly new and had only been in operation for a year or two. Two of the three pumps were operated on a variable frequency drive (VFD).  The first [...]

Have you desired to improve your analysis skills? Maybe you’d like to become more proficient with recognizing and interpreting the nuances of phase data? The best way to do this is by adding it to your daily routine, in your routes. By viewing phase data every day, you’ll soon become comfortable with it and it [...]

In today’s industry, predictive maintenance plays a big role in keeping machinery operating in peak condition. Many maintenance departments strive to have a first class predictive maintenance program; they do this by collecting data on a continuous basis through routes with handheld data collectors to evaluate the health of the machines that are needed to [...]

PLANT ENGINEERING • March 2012 Don’t contribute to unnecessary maintenance costs A condition monitoring analyst encounters many challenges. One of the primary ones is to determine when to report a defect finding. Should it be reported now or should reporting wait until the severity of the defect increases? How near is the problem that has been [...]

What’s shaking was a commonly used question many years ago to ask someone how things were going. It was very generic and could cover a vast range of things. It is still used today but the frequency in use has declined. When that question is asked of a person, they usually reply with “not much” [...]

The vibration analyst is expected to use his or her tools to gather the right vibration data to determine the practical health of process equipment. To distill a systematic workflow of this task, it can more easily be understood in the terms of an “input – output” process. The inputs are data taken from the [...]