Efficient Plant April 2022 - 10

feature | reliability strategies
Inexpensive and easy-to-install edge devices,
such as the Emerson AMS asset monitor, enable
plants to keep a close eye on even lower-criticality
assets. Photo courtesy Emerson
could have resulted in accelerated bearing
wear and consequent downtime.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF
EXISTING TECHNOLOGY
Moving to fully automated monitoring does
not mean existing tools become useless. To
the contrary, once reliability teams increase
data collection through continuous monitoring,
tools, such as handheld machinery
health analyzers, become more essential to
predictive and scheduled maintenance.
Automatically monitoring several assets
will generate alerts. Th ere will be no support
for altering or stopping operations every
time there's a potential issue. Edge analytics
built into sensors will provide the data
necessary to diagnose many issues but, in
some cases, the reliability team will need
higher resolution, higher-frequency data, or
will want to run some troubleshooting tests
to confi rm the severity and further pinpoint
the nature of the diagnosis.
Oſt en technicians may need to perform
other troubleshooting steps, such as bump
testing, coherence testing, cross-channel
analysis, order tracking, and timesynchronous
averaging, to identify and determine
root causes for problems. Th is need
is especially acute with complex machinery,
such as in variable-speed devices, multishaſt
assets, or machines in close proximity
to other equipment where diagnosis must
compensate for diff erent variables.
When plant personnel need more information,
the portable handheld analyzers
now become powerful tools. Because they
are no longer occupied with data-collection
rounds, technicians can use the analyzers,
in tandem with their own senses and
experience, to further diagnose the most
10 | EFFICIENTPLANTMAG.COM
complex problems. Armed with this extra
information, teams can plan and prioritize
corrective maintenance based on availability
of parts, resources, production schedules,
delivery times, and planned outages.
As plants move into the future with a
closer eye on staffi ng, supply chains, and
remote work, reliability teams will rely more
heavily on automated monitoring to ensure
effi cient delivery of critical information to
key personnel, wherever they may be. Th e
technology exists today to cost-eff ectively
move to fully automated monitoring. But, as
reliability teams implement those technologies,
it's also important not to lose sight of
the new role existing technologies can play
to build a comprehensive, holistic condition-monitoring
program. EP
Drew Mackley is Director of Reliability
Solutions at Emerson, St. Louis (emerson.
com). He has more than 25 years of experience
in the predictive-maintenance industry,
working with customers to establish and grow
machinery health-management programs in
a variety of industries and locations around
the world. He earned his BSEE degree at the
Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville.
APRIL 2022
http://www.EFFICIENTPLANTMAG.COM
Efficient Plant April 2022

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