Predictive maintenance helps Calpine reduce forced outages and cut MRO costs. The challenge for energy producers to supply continuous, uninterrupted power to customers is constant. Forced outages, which usually occur because of unexpected component failures or systemic problems, can prove costly to the power supplier and undermine its effort to attract and maintain satisfied customers.
Adding the correct amount of lubrication at each re-lubricating interval is essential to achieve maximum bearing life. An incorrect re-lubrication quantity, whether it’s too much or too little, can actually decrease bearing life.
Condition monitoring (CM) is not a life-extending activity. Life-extending activities are things such as lubrication, alignment, balancing and operating procedures. It’s very important to keep this very basic fact clear in all communications within your plant; otherwise, too little importance may be placed on the planning and scheduling of corrective work orders originated in CM.
Preventing Failures and Extending Life Torbjörn Idhammar, CEO & President IDCON INC IDCON’s “Current Best Practices” include nearly 300 elements. We normally use this document
Overgreasing rolling element bearings in motors has been an industry problem for several years. More motors have bearing failures due to overgreasing than from undergreasing. For the nuclear power generation industry in particular, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) provided guidance and direction. Their method delivered mixed performance results for the amount of resources that companies have had to devote to motor relubrication, motivating some organizations to develop additional improvements.
Choosing the right lubrication in the offshore industry is typically based on considerations such as performance and reliability, but this does not have to come at the expense of the environment. For any piece of industrial machinery to run smoothly, lubrication is a key consideration. In the offshore industry, where equipment may be stranded more than 100 miles from the shore, maximum efficiency is essential, so lubrication treatment must be carefully selected to ensure reliable performance. Where spares and replacement parts may be days away, ensuring that everything is fully functional is critical to the bottom line.
SPM Instrument AB, Sweden, launches a brand new diagnostic method in connection with Leonova™, a hand-held machine condition analyzer. Called the SPM Spectrum™, it is the result of an FFT on the time signal recorded with an SPM shock pulse transducer from a rolling element bearing. The individual bearing frequencies (BPI, BPO, 2*B2 and FT) and their harmonics are highlighted in the spectrum. This is displayed together with the measured shock value and a light signal, green, yellow or red that shows the result of bearing condition evaluation.
A long time ago, I discovered that most maintenance people like gadgets and smart methods, especially from within their fields. I must include myself in this group, and have learned to use the knowledge of a variety of maintenance methods to keep up my own enthusiasm while generating interest and commitment for implementing better preventive and corrective maintenance practices. Most of these methods are old, but they are very new to many, especially to people who are just entering the area of maintenance.
Although thermal imagers may be simple to operate, they are most effective in the hands of a qualified technician who understands electrical measurement and the equipment to be inspected. For anyone using this type of imager, the following three points are especially important.
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Torbjorn Idhammar is the blog manager for MaintenanceWorld.com.
A maintenance and reliability management consultant, Torbjorn has spent 25+ years in the profession and provides advice to clients around the world.
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She is responsible for reviewing submitted content for the site and ensuring that it provides value to the readers of the site.
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