If one expects to start a “long term” investment in production equipment, and one expects to achieve maximally profitable long term Return on Investment (ROI), one should know that one must have a properly designed and constructed foundation. As is obvious, if one has foundation problems at home, one must spend a lot of one’s hard earned money to get things back in shape. Production equipment is no different; one can cheaply fix a lot of things with shortcuts and offhand tactics, but a machine foundation is not one of them.
Of all the things we have seen come back to haunt equipment owner/operators draining expected profits, foundation inadequacies (including the foundation itself and the base) are probably the worst. There simply is no shortcut to fixing a poorly designed or constructed foundation and base. This may seem to be an odd topic for a blog by a vibration analyst, but the author has diagnosed this particular problem from the observed machine vibration many times. Poor foundations/bases yield recurring misalignment, mechanical looseness, metal fatigue cracking, seal failures, and resonance problems, to name just a few.
Diagnosis of the problem is just the beginning of a serious journey to a real, solid, and reliable fix, that often sets the owner/operator back a considerable amount of money as more “affordable” band-aids are attempted, before finally biting the bullet and “fixing it right”. It turns out that although a good foundation and base are more expensive than flimsy ones, putting a good foundation and base under an already installed machine is many, many times more expensive. So, how do you save money correctly?
Just one example: Perform “acceptance testing” vibration analysis on pumps and fans in particular. This may reveal problems in advance. Because once you’ve “accepted” it, ‘it’ is your machine, for better or worse. A bit of well-directed scrutiny up front will often save a lot of money later, especially in terms of major headaches over unscheduled downtime.
The foundation is not the first thing one thinks about when considering the need for new equipment, but if one doesn’t consider and build it correctly, it will be something one has to think about again and again.
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Vibration Analysis by Mike Fitch CRL