Vibration Monitoring

Protect Equipment and Shipments from Costly Damage with Vibration Monitoring

Why do you need vibration monitoring?  Because steady vibrations can cause damage, whether those vibrations are caused by the equipment itself, by nearby machines, or during shipping. 

Whether it’s the gentle hum of an MRI machine or the more robust vibrations associated with tunnel boring machines or other heavy equipment, vibrations can gradually cause conditions that, for example, reduce bearing life, misalign drive shafts, or signal that drive belts are loosening or other components are wearing out. 

Left unchecked, vibrations can damage equipment, cause unplanned maintenance, and significantly reduce the machinery’s working life.

Vibrations during transit can be equally damaging. Precision equipment can be vibrated out of calibration by the normal movements of trucks, trains, planes, and ships. The result can be instruments that arrive out of calibration or that have broken components. 

Either scenario requires a technician to travel onsite to make repairs, and prevents equipment from going into immediate service, thus increasing costs to the manufacturer and reducing opportunity for the customer. If not remedied, the results from analytic equipment may be wrong (possibly endangering human health), and subsequent failures will be inevitable.

When monitored, though, vibrations can become an important feature in a preventive maintenance and damage prevention plan. Vibration monitoring sensors placed on or inside the equipment provide an early warning that something is amiss, whether that equipment is operating or still in transit.

Enable Proactive Measures with Condition Monitoring Data and Alerts

The warning given by condition monitors allows maintenance professionals time to find and analyze the problem, order parts, and schedule maintenance before the equipment breaks and repairs become emergencies. This is handy in cities, and vital in remote parts of the world or on challenging jobs where equipment may be inaccessible. Failures in those situations can shut down operations indefinitely. Vibration monitoring helps you get ahead of the risk to minimize the chance of such failures occurring.

Vibration monitors are used in a wide variety of industries for equipment ranging from sensitive scientific instruments to heavy industrial machinery to help operators. As part of a maintenance or risk management program, maintenance personnel and logistics can monitor vibration sensors proactively. Therefore when real-time alerts occur, they can act immediately to mitigate operating and in-transit risks.

Knowing the environmental conditions equipment faces throughout its life, in real time, provides invaluable insights that not only let plant maintenance crews make proactive repairs, but also help logistics managers design more effective packaging to attenuate the vibration damage their products may experience during shipping.

Simply put, vibration monitoring gives you the data you need to fix small problems before they escalate.

To learn about how you can use vibration monitors to reduce in-transit and operating damage to your equipment, contact SpotSee.

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