Pruftechnik Blog

Condition Monitoring

ROTATEK rescues sand plant with help from PRÜFTECHNIK

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What started as a mechanical contracting business in 1993 has evolved into ROTATEK, a precision service company specializing in rotating equipment, including laser alignment, 3D metrology, field balancing, and vibration services. ROTATEK, based in Hackensack, N.J., also provides products and rentals, and its field service engineers are available for on-site, worldwide service 24/7.

ROTATEK’s field service engineers are available for on-site worldwide service 24/7.

 

A growing organization requires advanced tools

As ROTATEK’s laser alignment business has grown, so has its need for precise alignment tools, prompting it to begin using Prüftechnik laser equipment.

“Our first laser alignment tool was the OptAlign Smart,” says Steven Santos, ROTATEK’s founder and one of its field service engineers. “Great tool. We used it for 10 years without a problem.”

Santos researched other brands but wasn’t impressed with the products.

“They just weren’t on the same level as the Prüftechnik equipment,” Santos says. “They may have been cheaper, but if a cheaper unit is going take you a lot longer to do the alignment in the field, that doesn’t translate to saving money.”

Eventually, ROTATEK added RotAlign Ultras and later RotAlign Touch devices to its toolkit. They also began implementing vibration analysis to help troubleshoot rotating equipment in the field, leading to the acquisitions of the Prüftechnik VibXpert vibration analyzers and VibGuard advanced monitoring systems.

 

ROTATEK woos enterprise companies

In recent years, ROTATEK has provided its services to an increasing number of larger enterprise companies.

“We have a really good mix of different industries that we serve,” Santos continues. “In one week, we may be doing a turbine alignment with a laser tracker, and that same week we might do a 100-horse pump alignment with a RotAlign Touch.”

While his team could use a laser tracker to do a shaft alignment, it would take longer. Instead, they use the RotAlign Touch to do the same job in much less time.

“It’s faster to dimension the equipment. It’s faster to measure, see your results, and see your corrections,” he states. “You can also see your live moves right on the screen.”

 

ROTATEK solves root cause through expertise

A sand plant in New Jersey experienced a catastrophic blower failure that shut down its plant, costing as much as $50,000 in daily production losses. Of course, they called ROTATEK for its emergency rotating equipment services. Santos and his team responded quickly to assess the damage and get the plant back up and running.

“It was clear right away that the damage required a lot more than just a routine bearing replacement,” he describes. “The bearings, shaft, coupling, and blower wheel were all damaged beyond repair.”

Fortunately, the client was prepared with a spare rotor. The company decided that ROTATEK would work closely with their millwrights to ensure components were properly installed and the machine was reliable.

The team opted to assemble the rotors in a clean shop, minimizing the bearings’ exposure to sand and other contaminants. Once pre-assembled, the team closely followed the final installation procedures in the field. They carefully arranged the blower wheel’s axial and radial location, properly setting the radial clearance on the bearings, and checked the bearing face runout to ensure the bearings were correctly aligned to the shaft.

ROTATEK used its RotAlign Touch to precision-align the 350-hp motor to the blower. They successfully aligned the shaft to the tolerance with the coupling loose, and then verified in the final coupled state.

Monitoring the shaft with ROTATEK’s VibXpert II revealed some elevated vibration levels, indicating imbalanced mechanical looseness. Based on its experience with new rotor installs and the base and foundation condition, ROTATEK suspected this might happen and had informed the client in advance.

To meet production demands while operating at a safe vibration level, the company decided to reduce the blower speed during the midnight shift when no regular working millwrights were scheduled. The customer and ROTATEK developed a plan to correct the base issues and prepare the location for ROTATEK to balance the blower in the coming days.

 

ROTATEK got the dirt on a clogged dredge pump

The same sand plant had an emergency involving a dredge pumping plant, a marine vessel used to pump sand out of lakes and other bodies of water so it can be sold to municipalities to rebuild or enhance their shorelines.

“The dredge suffered frequent coupling failures, with each replacement coupling costing $7,000; not including the labor costs or $30,000 of production losses per day,” Santos explains. “And they had quite a few coupling failures in a short amount of time, so they reached out to us to diagnose and fix the problem.”

Santos and his team took a boat out to the barge with a variety of Prüftechnik equipment, including two VibXpert systems and a RotAlign Touch tool. The barge had a diesel engine, flexibly coupled to a large integral gear pump.

“We acquired an uncoupled measurement with our RotAlign and found excessive misalignment,” he says.

In addition to the misalignment, the Power Take Off (a foot-mounted component) was discovered to have severe angular soft foot. It didn’t have a strong mechanical fit, and the angular soft foot was so severe that it would take an inordinately long time to correct it using alignment shims.

“We recommended a product called RotaChocks, adjustable spherical chocks that could conform to an angled foot,” Santos continues.

For Santos, working on a ship with limited amounts of working space was a unique and challenging difficulty.

“It was a lot of out-of-position work. We were lying on our sides and working upside down,” he illustrates. “But in the end, we had a successful alignment that we verified with the RotAlign Touch.”

Santos and his team mounted the SensAlign heads and used Live Trend to monitor positional movement between the PTO and the gear pump.

Live trend setup
The Live Trend setup

The team went above deck and recorded vibration data through different speeds and processes. Santos and his team confirmed that there was no excessive positional travel.

“I think the movement that we may have recorded was less than two-thousandths of an inch. And they were working the barge hard—it’s not a delicate process when they’re mining for sand,” Santos says. “But we have Live Trend data to show that they didn’t have excess positional movement.”

washer hole
The equipment had cupped washers because the through-hole was so large that when it was bolted together, it mushroomed the washers.

 

Saving money with Prüftechnik tools

ROTATEK’s speedy response saved its customer a considerable amount of money on both jobs.

“The coupling was replaced three times prior to our service, and we installed the fourth one,” Santos explains. “Prüftechnik enabled us to give our customer the best of both worlds—accurate alignments and a product in RotAlign that helped us do more in much less time than a laser tracker.”

4 ways to put PRÜFTECHNIK remote services and solutions to work

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online condition monitoring remote services“Remote” became a household word for many working families in 2020. For the Prüftechnik Service Center team, “remote” became the best way to continue serving businesses worldwide during the pandemic.

Fortunately for our customers, the Prüftechnik Service Center clearly understands how remote solutions can help companies be productive and effective, especially during a global pandemic. The Service Center can leverage the vast storehouse of its team members’ practical knowledge and expertise and make available through online channels. Its service technicians have years, even decades, of experience in industrial maintenance. They are globally recognized and sought-after specialists in machinery alignment, machine trains, shafts and couplings, geometric alignment, vibration analysis, and condition monitoring.

Here are four ways to apply Prüftechnik expertise and experience to your situation.

1. Online condition monitoring

Prüftechnik has extensive experience and several ISO CAT I-IV experts in condition monitoring and vibration diagnosis and analysis. After the coronavirus’s global advance, the company enhanced the capabilities of its online condition monitoring and remote vibration analysis to provide pragmatic solutions for its customers.

Using stationary sensors, condition data is permanently stored at the machine and in a data center or cloud (via MQTT protocol). In-house specialists can perform the analysis, or the Prüftechnik Service Center can conduct it by accessing the data online. The data can also be analyzed remotely via software on a home PC.

Prüftechnik Online Condition Monitoring is a proven solution for the long-term (centralized) monitoring of machines and systems, even in difficult to access or geographically diverse locations.

2. Remote communication and knowledge transfer

Typically, Prüftechnik service technicians will visit a customer’s premises to address difficult challenges. However, travel restrictions and other constraints often prevent direct contact between customers and service technicians. Still, the Prüftechnik Service Center team continues to apply its expert knowledge for developing effective, sustainable solutions.

One of the silver linings that has come out of the focus on remote communication is the successful transfer of knowledge among customers and service experts. For example, Microsoft’s communication tool, Teams, is ideal for transferring know-how to a customer’s on-site service staff. At the same time, the employees involved can receive practical training through remote instructions.

3. Augmented reality

The latest innovation from the Prüftechnik Service Center team is a significant advance in augmented reality (AR) eyewear. AR makes it possible for the service technicians to see directly what the maintenance technician on-site sees and does. The service technician’s instructions appear projected onto the inside of the lens.

In this way, work can be carried out hand in hand as a team without a physical presence on site. Prüftechnik Services professionals in Poland are taking their first successful steps in AR using a large-scale project in Iraq. Other Prüftechnik Service Centers will soon offer this technology as a service solution.

4. Online courses and webinars

Prüftechnik in 2020 experienced enormous demand for online courses. Especially popular have been the free webinars lasting about one hour. Due to this strong response, we intend to expand this segment in the future.

At the same time, paid and certified online seminars are also generating a high response. The reason is obvious: If Prüftechnik consultants can no longer come to the company, you need your own specialists on-site—and these new experts can receive knowledge remotely via webinars and training courses from Prüftechnik.

If you’d like more information on Prüftechnik training and support, visit these pages on Prüftechnik.com.

The advantages of online AND route-based condition monitoring

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Organizations looking to implement online condition monitoring must have a well-organized maintenance and reliability (M&R) program as a foundation on which to grow. One that integrates sensor- and route-based condition monitoring technologies in its predictive maintenance (PdM) strategy to avoid unexpected downtime and productivity losses.

Like much in life, the best maintenance strategy isn’t one-sided but a combination of two complementary practices, allowing sensors to monitor critical assets around the clock and teams to complete route-based actions for these and all other machines.

 

‘Critical’ means crucial to production

To determine what should be monitored with sensors, one must first define what’s critical and what isn’t. An asset that may seem “simple,” like a motor or pump, may be highly critical. If production is impeded or halted from an asset, it was probably critical.
Critical isn’t about being large or complex. It’s about how crucial the asset is to the operation. Critical assets, by nature, need continuous condition monitoring. Only an online system comprised of internet-enabled sensors and intelligent software can reliably handle the task of 24/7 monitoring.

Sensors send parameters—such as temperature, rotation speed, vibration, particulate amounts in lubrication, and other measurements—to condition monitoring software for processing. From there, technicians and managers can check asset status in real time, visualize data in dashboards and reports, and make the correct decisions based on incoming data.

Route-based maintenance is still necessary for maintaining critical assets. But as long as an asset is operating within parameters, regular maintenance checks are often less urgent and more routine. That’s because as soon as a measurement crosses the threshold, condition monitoring software sends an alert to technicians. For example, when vibration on a gearbox exceeds peak tolerances, the vibration specialist automatically receives a notification.

 

Condition monitoring strategies that complement each other

One might ask, “Why have manual, route-based monitoring if there’s already an online condition monitoring system?” However, these two maintenance strategies cannot be mutually exclusive.

A team’s approach must be balanced; retaining manual, route-based measurements and monitoring with handheld devices, while sprinkling in online monitoring through sensors and software for the vast majority of assets, especially the critical ones.
Additionally, there are many handheld tools for which there currently aren’t autonomous options on the market. As sensor technology continues to evolve, technicians must still rely on known and trusted handheld tools.

Luckily, handheld devices are increasingly becoming internet-enabled, allowing technicians in the field to send measurements back to the same software used with automated condition monitoring sensors.

Only by combining sensors and handheld devices can teams analyze the full-breadth of data to determine trends or predict asset health. These two practices complement each other, rather than replacing one for the other. Using them together is the best strategy for lowering operations costs and extending asset life.

 

Are you trending? Do you predict or react?

While the sweet spot for predictive maintenance (PdM) lies in combining online and route-based strategies, the data sits there until experts analyze and trend the data over time. Trending data is the best way to detect recurring abnormalities that indicate an impending fault.

For example, data from continuous vibration monitoring provides an early indication of bearing, seal, or coupling wear and tear. Experts trending the data can pinpoint the problem with plenty of time to order spare parts and schedule downtime to occur when it doesn’t impact operations.

Teams leveraging emerging—Maintenance 4.0 or Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)—technologies “listen” to what assets are saying through the data gathered, trended, and analyzed. Maintenance activities become more agile and less costly. And operations can reliably deliver on time—whether they’re at sea, onshore, or rolling off a production line.

 

Saving costs and a harbor crane’s life

A Fluke Reliability client used harbor cranes to load and unload cargo from container ships. One crane was having recurring issues with the gearbox. The maintenance team detected a prematurely worn-out gear, but the problem persisted even after replacing the component and reinforcing the gearbox for heavy loads.

Using an online condition monitoring system, a technician discovered the problem’s root cause in the amount of particulate in the lubricating oil. During colder temperatures, the internal operating temperature dropped below 17°C (63°F), increasing vibration and accelerating wear on the gear. It was only through the utilization of an always-on, online condition monitoring system that experts found the root cause.

The client saw a near-immediate return on investment into the condition monitoring system, as the crane returned to operation quickly, had fewer oil-related breakdowns, and had higher reliability. Cargo flowed on and off the ships once again.