Plant Services - September 2007 - (Page 67) WEB HUNTER Hot, slick and shaky The Web supports the pillars on which predictive maintenance rests E veryone with any sense already embraces the resident thermographic hotshot, then you should be able idea that maintenance operations need to be deto ace the three quizzes you’ll find at www.snellinfrared. termined by the condition and reliability of the com/iriq. This is where John Snell and Associates, Inc., equipment being maintained. Watch closely, listen careMontpelier, Vt., has posted three 10-question quizzes fully, touch gently and trust that the hardware will tell covering thermographic theory and application. The speyou when it wants your attention. The trick is having the cific questions change periodically, so I guess you’ll need proper enhancements for your eyes, ears and fingers to to keep returning to defend your title as the corporate help you record, quantify and document the hardware’s IR guru. current health. What you do with the data after that is the hard part. Reading can stop the shakes Don’t despair. Help is at hand right online. That’s why Another pillar of predictive maintenance is vibration I’d like to invite you on a romp through that endless moanalysis. It’s a technology that requires converting a timerass we call the Web to pick up just a few of domain signal into a frequency-domain sigthe countless practical, zero-cost, noncomnal, a mind-bending exercise in higher math If you’re the mercial, registration-free pearls of wisdom that can’t be performed easily with a pencil that can help move you even farther away plant’s resident and paper. Instead, we grab raw data and let from getting bogged down in reactive mainthermographic computers do the heavy lifting, which frees tenance. Remember, we search the Web so the human to do the high-value work, interhotshot, then you don’t have to. preting the resulting spectrum. Acquiring you should be the ability to perform such analysis requires Wisdom of the masses training, and a good place to start learning able to ace the Reading the collected works of one author is online. To get you started, check out “A three quizzes. only gives you an insight into one person’s Brief Tutorial on Machine Vibration” by views. When you seek best practices, it Victor Wowk, P.E., of Machine Dynamics, might be better to broaden your input. A good way to Inc., Rio Rancho, N.M. To do so, your studious mouse do this is through an online forum, which allows you to will need to attend classes at www.machinedyn.com, read comments and advice about a range of topics within where its homework is to click on “Books and Articles.” a particular forum’s scope. One such example is found at The payoff is a link to a free 10-page booklet about the www.vibinst.org/forum/default.asp, a service of the Vibasics of vibration analysis. The three books featured on bration Institute, Willowbrook, Ill. In addition to vibrathat page have a cost, so start with the freebie. tion, the topics covered include certification, diagnostics, If that brief exploration whets your interest, you can go instrumentation, reliability, maintenance management, after the complete textbook posted by DLI Engineering mechanical fault analysis and, of course, this month’s Corp., Bainbridge Island, Wash. Flip open the dust jacket topic, predictive maintenance. at www.dliengineering.com and click on “Vibration Reference” in the lower left. When the new page loads, click How hot is it? on the entry called “Introduction to Machine Vibration That’s a good question that’s often best answered by Online Text Book.” At that point, you only need to click means of thermography, one of the pillars of predictive on the word “next” in the upper right to view each page in maintenance. Before those answers can be given, howsequence, and there are a lot of pages to view. You can save ever, there are some procedural questions you ought to be a bit of time by skipping the basic material. To do this, able to answer before the thermographic readings begin click on “Introduction to Vibration” in the left column. to make any sense in the real world. If you’re the plant’s From there, use the “next” link as before. September 2007 www.PLANTSERVICES.com 67 http://www.plantservices.com/voices/web_hunter.html http://www.vibinst.org/forum/default.asp http://www.dliengineering.com http://www.PLANTSERVICES.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.