Remote Diagnostics Improve Reliability
The new services can give you condition monitoring with remote diagnosis at any time 24 hours a day/7 days a week. The condition-based maintenance partnership can be created to give you the chance to correct a potential problem before it occurs.
The Refinery is operating 24 Hours 7 days a week, established in a country 5 thousand miles away from headquarter and diagnosis team. The equipment is a classical centrifugal pump at the oil tank farm. Vibration sensors are installed on the pump bearing housing. The user wants to improve its predictive strategy on the critical pumps located far away from pure production equipment.
Condition monitoring detects noise and bearing fault frequencies on the drive side of the pump. The high vibration comes from a bearing fault (BSF) on the drive side of the pump. The vibration amplitudes have increased in a short period. Action is required.
Failure occurred on July 20, where the vibration reading reached 1.08 IPS PK, however 8 hours earlier on July 19 the vibration record showed only 0.27 IPS PK. The problem developed within 8 hours between 18:27 on July 19 and 1:23 on July 20. Prior to July 19 the vibration measurement readings varied from 0.21 IPS PK to 0.25 IPS PK.
Corrective Actions
Pump bearings were replaced within 5 days. The old bearings were delivered for RCFA and the equipment was measured again after the replacement. The vibration values were back to normal.
In order to meet these kinds of challenges, an efficient work schedule is required. Only predictive maintenance allows avoiding unnecessary interventions and their related costs. This schedule requires detecting emerging defects, and therefore more advanced technologies are needed.
In order to schedule maintenance actions, an equipment-monitoring schedule should be set up. Thanks to actual technical developments like wireless vibration and temperature systems, bearing defects on classic equipment can be detected typically 6 months before it reaches a risk level of shutdown. In this case study the continuous surveillance was set up in a very effective way for the user and analyst allowed us to detect in time this sudden high bearing fault.
Improve On-line Monitoring
Online monitoring based on permanent wired sensors can be expensive in many applications. Wireless monitoring improves the reliability of difficult-to-monitor assets with a quick and cost effective installation. Wireless vibration monitoring lends added value with a more flexible system, cutting expense and labour costs on installation and maintenance of the old wired vibration and temperature sensors.
The sensors are attached using extra-strong magnets where they are needed and in minutes they create a large network of real time data transmission to the gateway.
The solution created by Wi-care™ is very flexible and cost effective because it allows the reuse of existing piezoelectric vibration sensors and turns them into wireless vibration sensors with the single action of plugging the sensor into the wireless transmitter.
The solution is based on a receiver connected on the Internet. It is able to manage up to 144 transmitters, each transmitter sending vibration and temperature data. In order to reach long distance data transfer and remote locations, the Wi-care™ involves a range extender in its network. Using a web-based portal to manage the system avoids any extra cost and any difficulties linked to software.
The benefit for the user is easy installation with low upfront investment and permanent pump protection. The solution confirms continuous data, instant trend data and 24/7 protection were necessary to detect and analyse such a sudden bearing health change. This solution allows decreased maintenance costs and increased equipment availability at the same time.
The Wi-care™ system has been designed to detect, measure and analyse the root causes of excessive levels of vibration and temperature. The system is a cost-effective tool used to report any vibration or temperature deviation in a short time. The team of engineers using the data are able to give you a condition monitoring remote diagnosis at any time 24 hours a day/7 days a week. The condition-based maintenance partnership has been created to give you the chance to correct a potential problem before it occurs.