A lot of maintenance employees believe that small machine trains can be precision aligned more quickly and easily than larger machine trains. This is not always the case!  Smaller machine trains are usually less rigid. This can cause the alignment to shift as the anchor bolts are tightened.  Almost all small machine trains have some [...]

Taking the Heat out of Thermal Growth Issues – Part 1 by Daus Studenberg “Thermal growth” often refers to the change in machinery positions as a machine runs from startup to operating conditions (or vice versa). Machinery positional change can also be caused by dynamic forces, pipe stress and other factors. Compensating for thermal growth [...]

TURBOMACHINERY INTERNATIONAL • May/June 2012 Thermal growth, as used in the field of machinery alignment means machine frame expansion resulting from heat generation. The generation of heat, of course, is caused by operational processes and forces. Materials subjected to temperature changes from heat generation will expand by precise amounts defined by their material properties. In [...]

Hot alignment checks are often unsuccessful because of delays in installing measuring devices on the equipment which has just been shut down. Even when good planning and organization allowed you to take readings within minutes of shutdown, these readings only address the so called “Thermal Growth”. Often the effects of thermal growth on alignment had [...]

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 [...]

Ludeca, Inc. presents “Laser Align“, a free reference tool for shaft alignment of rotating equipment. With this app, you can access important reference material and learn about key laser shaft alignment concepts. “Laser Align” features the demanding tolerances that have been the industry norm, pioneered by Ludeca in 1983.  These exact same tolerances are used [...]