Changing face of plant communications

A recent article in Works Management discussed the changing face of plant and factory communications, and suggested that engineers were not always providing the best and most cost-effective monitoring available.

Custom, caution and a lack of finances appeared to be the main reasons for this.  The third of those factors seemed particularly ironic when the article went on to describe how a lack of investment led to an expensive failure that could have been avoided by vibration monitoring.

The incident occurred at an onshore plant, where the vibration monitoring of critical remote sea water cooling pumps was only conducted at fortnightly intervals because wiring them up to the plant management system was considered too expensive.  As a result, a pump imbalance was picked up too late, leading to a serious failure of equipment.  Worse still, replacement parts took months to arrive and during the wait the plant lost a massive 20% of its process capacity.

Vibration monitoring can protect plant from such major losses of capability, with the cost of wiring assets to the plant management system demanding a significantly lower cost than that of a lengthy loss of production capacity. By conducting predictive maintenance via vibration monitoring you can cost-effectively monitor machine health and activity, and use the information gathered to reduce the risk of plant failure in the future.