You are 17 times more likely to introduce defects during equipment start-up than during normal equipment operation. Additionally, over 90 percent of rotating equipment has defects at start-up that result in premature equipment failures. What’s causing these start-up defects?

It’s essential that maintenance teams focus on failure modes to match the most suitable tool to the most likely problems. Vibration analysis helps diagnose the most common faults that rotating machines are susceptible to: imbalance, looseness, misalignment, and wear. The compatible trio of owning the right tools, knowing what to test, and sustaining a functional vibration testing program can potentially reduce repair costs and limit unproductive maintenance hours.

When Benjamin Franklin wrote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he was referring to fire safety. But, as you may know from experience, this saying holds true with regard to preventive maintenance (PM). Simply stated, preventive maintenance is an activity performed at a set interval to maintain an asset, regardless of its current condition. It’s a properly planned activity, where materials and parts are on hand and labor is scheduled ahead of time.

The primary physical characteristics of lubricants that are affected by temperature include viscosity, viscosity index, pour point and the base oil. Let’s deal with these individually.

The need for health monitoring in industrial machines using vibration analysis for diagnosis is an ever growing requirement in all types of industries and equipment. Vibrations in machinery can take various forms, and most of the time these vibrations are unintended and undesirable. Therefore, monitoring the vibration characteristics of a machine can provide the information of its health condition, and this piece of information can be used to detect problems that might be incipient or developing.