Is your vibration analysis program or other Condition Monitoring technology simply predicting failures or also identifying the causes of the failures?

Vibration analysis is a very useful tool for identifying failure modes in equipment. Bearing failures, unbalance, misalignment, belt issues, and many other problems can be easily identified with vibration analysis. However, the value of vibration analysis goes well beyond just simply identifying what equipment is about to fail. Stopping at this level will ensure that the same failure will most likely occur again in the future and be identified again in the future by your vibration analysis program or other CM technology.

A good vibration analysis data collector and software will have tools to help you identify what is causing the bearings to fail, misalignment to occur, etc in your equipment. Use this additional functionality to identify the root causes of the equipment failures that your routine vibration analysis efforts uncover. This will allow you to eliminate the things that are causing the failures in your equipment. This means that your facility will replace fewer bearings, do fewer alignments, etc. on your equipment. This will save maintenance dollars and increase the overall reliability of your equipment.