Remote Machinery Monitoring - a Developing Industry

Remote monitoring of rotating equipment has been around in one form or another for several years. With the advent of wireless communications and the Internet, it is now possible to wirelessly communicate with machines and view data via web site interfaces. These changes in technology allow data to be analyzed remotely by experts so that actionable advice can be supplied to the end users who are operating the equipment. Two of the most common words used to describe our economy today are "high technology" and "service." Wireless-web-based remote monitoring by off-site specialists is a prime example of the unification of these two concepts.

Monitoring the health of rotating equipment has come into and out of favor several times over past decades. Lapses in monitoring created by job cuts or reorganizations are followed by unanticipated failures, which then reignite interest in predictive maintenance technologies. The reason for this type of pattern is that predictive maintenance is an important - but noncritical - function. What this means is that if you do not perform predictive maintenance, then nothing happens right away. Like not going to the dentist, which is also an important but noncritical function, after a long enough time, it suddenly becomes very critical. Installing remote monitoring systems helps narrow the swing of the predictive maintenance pendulum by decoupling the predictive maintenance program from the swings that are tied to the availability of in-house personnel. Some of the driving forces that help promote a consistent predictive maintenance program are presented below.

* Predictive maintenance programs make sense. From an economic perspective, it is logical to replace a $500 bearing rather than to repair $5,000 in consequential damages or have a $50,000 loss in downtime. Since by its very nature predictive maintenance prevents these failures from occurring in the first place, it has always been difficult to get a handle on the benefits. It becomes a little bit like buying life insurance. It is sometimes hard to justify, but a wise manager does not want to gamble and do without it.

* Certain quality programs like ISO certification require facilities to include predictive maintenance on machines that are critical to the process.

* Regulatory agencies like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) or the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require testing of the condition of equipment that is critical to the safe operation of the plant or vital to the quality of the production process.

These factors that produce a need for a consistent program have been present for a long time. What has changed recently is availability of technology that makes it practical to do so from the perspective of remote monitoring.

A Paradigm Shift in the Future

It is hard to predict the future precisely. As well known futurists have indicated, there are some things we can do to at least get an idea of where we are headed. For instance, you cannot predict what will happen tomorrow. But you can predict with a fair degree of certainty, based upon past experience, that the earth will keep turning, the stock market will go up and down and there will be trouble somewhere in the world. We can therefore start to look into the future by studying the past and then looking at the forces of change and our available options in regard to responding to these forces. One well known futurist gave the following thoughts regarding agriculture and manufacturing. "If we look at past stages of development, we can see, in the case of agriculture, that the system became more and more efficient. We still grow incredible quantities of corn, wheat soybeans and cotton; we just do it with a small fraction of the personnel that it used to take. The same is true with mining and manufacturing. Tremendous amounts of coal are mined and vast quantities of goods are produced, it just takes far less people to do the work." Based on what has happened to other industries, we can predict with a pretty good degree of certainty that the information industry, of which predictive monitoring is a part, will have to get more done with less people.

In the predictive maintenance arena, part of the efficiency increase will be attained by getting smarter on how we monitor things. For instance, should all equipment in a plant be monitored on a monthly basis as is often done? Most likely that is not the case. Should very critical equipment be monitored more frequently? This is also probably true. We can therefore increase both effectiveness and efficiency by more closely studying which equipment to monitor and how often to do so. The greatest potential for efficiency improvements in predictive maintenance, however, lies in the synergism of combining the technologies that are either presently available or in development. Wireless sensors coupled with in-plant networks and accessed by the Internet promise to automate the collection and logging of data. These data will then be available for viewing by analysts anywhere there is an Internet connection. The vibration analyst could literally be sitting in an airport, at home or in a motel with a wireless connection looking at the condition of his critical machines and sending correspondence to operations on whether or not the equipment will make it to the next outage.