Condition Monitoring

Background
Most engineers are aware of the advantages of condition based maintenance: reduced operating costs, increased asset availability and minimized maintenance costs.

With the ongoing reduction of in-house manpower throughout the water industry, Spaans Babcock have recognized the need for a suitable system, which for minimum initial outlay and without the need for continual operator intervention fulfils these requirements.

The solution
Traditional condition monitoring techniques, the majority of which are based around vibration monitoring technology, work very well on equipment which operates at relatively high speeds. Archimedean screw pumps which operate at low speeds (20 - 90 rpm depending on screw diameter) do not lend themselves to monitoring in this manner.

Spaans Babcock, having experimented with various types of condition monitoring equipment have now opted to utilize condition and performance monitoring equipment based around Acoustic Emission (AE) sensors.

AE sensing is concerned with the detection of naturally occurring energy waves which are generated by processes associated with friction, impacts and metal removal. These become more prominent and frequent as the machinery degrades. The processing technology ensures that the system is able to detect this degradation even at very slow rotational speeds such as encountered on an operating screw pump.

Advantages of the Spaans Babcock CM System:
The applied technology - based on acoustic emission – is suitable for monitoring low speed (<100 rpm) applications. No other monitoring technology can measure the condition of a screw pump bearing as reliably as the CM system from Spaans Babcock.
Of course the system is also a perfect tool for measuring high speed applications.

The acoustic emission technology can detect bearing problems at a very early stage, before bearing damage occurs. The technology is suitable to monitor rolling bearings as well as plain bearings.

Applications are not limited to bearing monitoring only. An example is monitoring the performance of mono pumps pumping a dry medium. The generated noise of the pump is registered by the sensor, telling us the pump is in operation. If there is no flow to the inlet of the pump noise level will decrease generating an alarm.

The Spaans Babcock CM system operates continuously online, including 24 hour alarm features.
Reports are available on the internet and are supplied through Spaans Babcock. The customer does not need to invest in man hours to gather and analyze the measured data. There is no special training needed to work with the system.
Price setting is competitive compared to other online systems available on the market.

Besides bearing condition the Spaans Babcock condition monitoring system can also log other machine parameters to identify the complete machine performance. Therefore the system is equipped with the possibility to log conventional parameters from a local PLC, like power, flow, running hours etc. This feature makes the system a unique "all-in monitoring system".