Many companies still use a system of planned or routine maintenance to avoid costly down-time arising from the failure of equipment and machinery (‘assets’). In other words they replace parts that tend to wear out (e.g. motor bearings) on a routine basis whether they need replacing or not.

Condition based maintenance (condition monitoring) relies on the fact that the condition (degree of wear) of the asset is routinely monitored (by measuring the vibration levels in motor bearings for example) and only replaced when its condition deteriorates beyond an acceptable level. This decision is based on recording and tracking the changes in the asset’s condition over time (‘trending’).

This obviously saves money since asset parts are only changed when they need to be. Additionally, condition monitoring can potentially save a lot of money by spotting a part that is about to fail prematurely before it fails hence avoiding an unexpected and costly shut-down.

Clearly condition monitoring is a superior technique but until now its cost has prevented many companies from using it. Traditionally, both the condition monitoring equipment and the expertise required to carry out an analysis of the asset’s condition has been prohibitively expensive.

C-Cubed has revolutionised this concept by developing Pocket VibrA, a low cost, portable vibration analyser for carrying out condition monitoring that is incredibly easy to use. This ease of use stems from the fact that the system is implemented on a Pocket PC that is both powerful and simple to use. Running Windows software, the Pocket PC is instantly familiar to most users and the condition monitoring data is automatically saved in a readily accessible format, using industry standard database software.

C-Cubed’s free to use C-Trend™ asset management and data trending software stores asset data and readings and displays trends of process parameters, including vibration data, in a clear and easily understood graphical format. In addition, various ‘expert system’ features are incorporated into the software, such as bearing quality assessment, which is achieved by analysing the frequency components of the vibration data and spotting the classic ‘signatures’ associated with bearing wear. Thus it is possible for a user to monitor the health of a bearing simply by observing the trend of its bearing quality value on the appropriate C-Trend™ graph.

The software also incorporates an Asset Wizard™ that allows assets, such as motors, pumps and fans, to be simply and easily added to the database by the user. The wizard automatically sets up the assets using international standard measurement points and alarm levels. These alarm levels are then used to colour code readings so that alarms are displayed in red, warnings in yellow and valid readings in green.

The benefits to users of such a system include the ability to track changes in asset condition and hence implement an effective condition based maintenance strategy without the need to pay costly consultants to take readings. There is still a role for the consultant to play but this is more likely to involve advising on the more unusual faults that show up within vibration data and this can usually be done without a site visit simply by emailing the appropriate C-Trend™ asset data to the expert.