Operational analytics are used to help improve safety, reliability, energy & emissions, and production. From a reliability perspective, one example is PeakVue impact detection analytics which provides early warning for problems such as rotating equipment bearing failures. You may recall an announcement from last year about PeakVue Plus:
…a technology enhancement that brings prescriptive analytics to the field to help users improve the availability of rotating machinery. The firmware streamlines the path from data collection to action and enables users to make timely, corrective decisions when analyzing machinery vibration.
In a Plant Services article, Get better insights from your vibration data, Emerson’s Brian Overton describes how this innovation allows maintenance technicians to improve the time from data collection and analysis to making decisions to correct the situation.
Typically, maintenance managers:
…send technicians on scheduled routes to gather machinery vibration data. Experts then analyze the data, and managers make decisions to act based on the resulting analyses.
This traditional approach requires proper data collection from a portable analyzer or continuous monitoring system. The vibration data is collected and turned into a spectral plot through fast Fourier transform (FFT) algorithms. This spectral plot can help identify issues such as:
…a cracked or broken tooth when two gears are meshing together.
Potential downsides with the FFT spectral analysis are:
…some frequencies may overwhelm the range of the analyzer, thus masking, or hiding, the frequencies that indicate other defects. When these frequencies are hidden, identification of issues might come in the late stages of failure.
To overcome the possibility of late problem identification, PeakVue analytics capture:
…the true peak amplitudes of these impacting events, providing severity evaluation along with spectral and waveform patterns. These true peak amplitudes are repeatable and trendable over time, providing an early warning of developing faults so proper planning and prioritization of corrective actions can take place to avoid an unplanned outage.
Read the article for more on what these operational analytics look like and how they are used to help maintenance technicians spot problems earlier to allow repairs to be scheduled before slow downs or downtime is incurred.
Learn more about PeakVue Plus technology in the PeakVue Technology for Machinery Analysis section on Emerson.com. You can also connect and interact with other reliability experts in the Asset Management group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.
