Maintaining A Vibration Monitoring Program

The outcome of effective machine condition monitoring are ultimately maintenance decisions.  It is not sufficient to simply identify components that may be vibrating excessively.  It must go beyond that; allowing a facility owner to estimate risk to production or generation, and to write work instructions used by maintenance personnel to correct threatening conditions.

 

When confronted with a large and expanding vibration database, machine vibration analysts may be overcome with questions of where they should concentrate their attention and what actions should be taken to insure important data is not ignored.  The document linked below presents a distilling technique; it distills information from an existing vibration database into a system that yields necessary maintenance decisions.  It is offered as an example of one such approach taken at a US nuclear generating station; and which may, in turn, be used at other types of generation or production facilities.