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 question is answered by
Natalia A. Barkova:
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.
