31 March 1999

QUESTION 1.7:

In the manuals concerning your systems you often mention that it is worth to customize the system to certain types of machines and to certain industries where these machines are used. Is it necessary to customize your system to all machines and what includes such customizing?
(The question was asked by the specialists in the helicopters' maintenance).

The customizing of our monitoring and diagnostics systems to certain types of machines is made comparatively rare and only once. For typical machines such as electrical machines, pumps, gearboxes, blowers, compressors and many others, that are used in the power industry, such adjustment is already made several years ago and there is no need to do it again.

As our systems diagnose each machine unit the customizing is not needed if it is possible to measure the vibration on unit's case without operation interruption. But the adjustment, if it has not been made before, is made when there is no access to the unit diagnosed and the vibration has to be measured on some distance where the contribution in the high frequency vibration is made not only by the diagnosed unit but also by other machine units.

As an example we can present you the situation when our specialists together with the users have made the adjustment of our systems to certain types of gas and steam turbines of aircraft engines, transmission systems of certain car types, wheel and gearboxes locomotive blocks, special machines, used in gas and oil refining industry and some other industries.

The adjustment to the new types of machines is usually not very labor consuming work and the time of its completion does not exceed, as a rule, three months if the user has a large number (more than 10) machines of one type. This work includes:

• the analysis of typical failures in the machine type you are interested in and the definition of the possible chains of defect development;
• the definition of the optimal measurement points of machine vibration and modes of machine operation during diagnostic measurements;
• vibration measurements of group of machines of one type (10 and more) in selected control points in specified mode of operation and tree or four machines in different mode of operations that are provided by their operation specification;
• corrections of modules (programs) of certain machine units automatic diagnostics by the measurement data;
• corrections of alarm levels of the most dangerous defects, from the point of view of accident, as the statistical data are accumulated. These data have to be accumulated by two methods: one - by the results of machine diagnostics when there are recommendation for maintenance, and second - by the results of visual inspection.

The customizing of diagnostic complex, as a rule, does not require the designers to be present near the operating machine. The control points are selected by the construction documents and the measurements are conducted by the user sending the results to the designers via communication lines. And finally the user can adjust the alarm levels by himself without the help of the designers.