Our engineers had a busy night successfully testing our Portamonitor® and Portasonic® 2.FL0 during field trials onboard a LPG Vessel. This involved testing bearing wear and tear in the pump room and monitoring oil flows.
Our Portamonitor® can monitor bearings in motors, pumps, fans, gearboxes and other rotating machinery applications. While the Portasonic® 2.FL0 measures the flow rate of your liquid non-invasively.
Monitoring both bearings and flow rates can detect abnormalities and allow preparations for maintenance or replacement. Flow rates are an important metric for understanding the operational efficiency of a process and can help mitigate corrosion risks. Similarly bearing monitoring can ensure the efficient operation of machinery and mitigate safety risks. Ultimately avoiding failure and saving money.
Importance of Bearings and Mitigating Failures
Bearings are integral devices widely used in machinery that requires rotational, axial or linear movement to operate. They restrict motion to a designed path, minimising friction and stress. Many industries have machinery that requires some form of motion enabled by bearing. These include steel production, mining, paper processing, cement, thermal power, maritime.
However, bearings are liable to degradation overtime. According to studies conducted by the Mobius Institute bearing defects fall into four broad categories:
- Handling / Installation
- Fatigue: Excessive load can result in damage to bearings and housing and results in premature fatigue or failure.
- Lubrication: Incorrect lubrication, as well as insufficient levels, can cause friction which can lead to fractures among other defects.
- Contamination: Contamination both in the bearing housing or the lubrication can damage and reduce the life of bearings.
The cost of bearing failure is variable and depends on the position of the defect and if any associated damage has occurred. Yet, the cost can rise quickly and in severe cases, when bearing monitoring has been limited and total failure has occurred, then the cost can be tremendous. For example, think about the cost of repair, fitting and downtime in dock and loss of earning whilst not operational.
The Role of Monitoring in Mitigating Risks
We cannot prevent handling and instillation failures through direct monitoring. However, 84% of failures occur after installation, all of which you can mitigate by effective monitoring.
Monitoring is essential for detecting faults in any of the three identified categories. Thereby allowing you to spot abnormalities and prepare for maintenance or replacement.
You can choose between two main forms of monitoring. These are vibration analysis (VA) and acoustic emission (AE).
VA is based on the understanding that excessive vibrations can indicate a serious problem. Complex software is then used to analyse the vibrational data to diagnose machinery faults. Therefore, allowing you to plan the required maintenance before a catastrophic failure occurs.
Strains, stresses and impacts produce transient stress (elastic) waves which can be effectively detected. AE works on the principle of using transient elastic waves to detect the rapid release of strain energy caused by deformations or damage within the surface of materials. Consequently, allowing you to detect the very early stages of bearing degradation. You can use AE to effectively monitor different machine conditions; balanced, unbalanced, misaligned and defecting bearings.
Why Use AE for Bearing Monitoring?
The immediate advantage of AE is that mechanical noise is not present in its range. Distinguishing between machine noise and defect noise is crucial because it ensures confidence that defects will be missed. Thereby allowing the detection of defects in the very early stages.
Defect frequencies are highly dependent on machinery designs and component geometry and are also a function of bearing geometry, pitch, roller diameter and the relative speed between raceways. Fortunately, AE is less geometrically sensitive than VA.
Diagnosis using VA requires highly technical knowledge. In addition to being very time-consuming. You need to a “baseline” from the initial conditions of the machinery to identify defects using VA. This baseline is then used to indicate an irregular condition by monitoring an overall trend. This trend will enable you to highlight anomalies. However, this trend may not change if the fault is not severe, or the signal is insensitive to the fault.
The Portamonitor® and Portasonic® 2.FL0
The Portamonitor® can aid in identification of mechanically deteriorated bearings and bearings with inadequate/contaminated lubricant. It does this by detecting high frequency (ultrasonic) stress waves associated with friction and other faults with machinery in poor condition (impacts etc.).
Portamonitor® simultaneously measures and displays two outputs: a decibel (dB) reading and a Distress® level.
The decibel reading indicates the intensity of the received signal. This is essentially how ‘loud’ the high frequency sound produced by the bearing is. The reading will increase with deteriorating function of the bearing and a guide is included on the correct interpretation of the decibel reading. It is recommended that logs are kept of the decibel reading for each site. This allows easy identification of deteriorating bearings as the decibel reading begins to increase.
The Distress® signal indicates how much the decibel reading fluctuates during a measurement, representing the degree of knocking, clanking, or grinding in the bearing. As a result, the Distress® signal helps you determine if the bearing is damaged, poorly lubricated, or malfunctioning. Allowing you to confidently assess the need for maintenance. Moreover, since the Portamonitor® automatically calculates and displays this signal, it requires minimal user input and provides an immediate assessment of the bearing’s condition.
Portasonic® 2.FL0 is a portable ultrasonic transit-time flow meter that measures, internally records, and exports the flow rate within a pipe with precision and ease. Users can customise its pre-programmed database to work with a wide variety of pipe materials and liquid types. This makes it a highly versatile monitoring solution that can be easily adapted for specific applications.
Coltraco Ultrasonics
As a high-exporting British manufacturer, Coltraco specialises in ultrasonic and acoustic systems and instrumentation. We are an advanced scientific instrument manufacturer who serve 25 diverse market sectors, from shipping and fire safety engineering to offshore energy, renewables, and the built environment.
We are committed to upholding the Safeship™ and Safesite™ principles:
Safeship™: Our instruments are installed on 17% of the world’s 60,000 ships, safeguarding against catastrophic failures by monitoring watertight integrity and ensuring the safe containment of fire-extinguishing gases like CO2.
Safesite™: Serving over 20 market sectors, our instruments ensure that safety-critical systems—such as gaseous fire suppression systems, sprinkler systems, and process control equipment in high-value assets—function effectively. In the Built Environment, our technology identifies airtightness and energy loss.
We are able to develop custom solutions for bearing monitoring and to find out more, please contact a member of our team.
