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In this maintenance article section you will find a selection of reliability
and maintenance papers that we find interesting. The reliability articles
in this section are not written by, or related to IDCON, Inc. Many of
the papers are technical in nature. There are maintenance articles on
subjects such as alignment, vibration analysis, thermography, lubrication
and general equipment knowledge. We hope you will find this reliability
and maintenance information useful.
Maintenance articles:
Centrifugal
Pumps
The operating manual of any centrifugal pump often starts with a general
statement, "Your centrifugal pump will give you completely trouble
free and satisfactory service only on the condition that it is installed
and operated with due care and is properly maintained.” Despite
all the care in operation and maintenance, engineers often face the statement
“ the pump has failed i.e. it can no longer be kept in service”.
Inability to deliver the desired flow and head is just one of the most
common conditions for taking a pump out of service. There are other many
conditions in which a pump, despite suffering no loss in flow or head,
is considered
Change Your Lubrication
Culture, Not Your Oil
We change a lot of oil in our plants, mills, mines and factories. What
are we doing to change our lubrication culture? In their book Learning
to Fly, Collison and Parcell, employees of British Petroleum (BP), suggest
a predictable pattern in achieving sustained culture change, which is
a function of effort and time
Determining Accurate
Alignment Targets
The previous article in this series, "Understanding Shaft Alignment: Thermal
Growth" (MT 1/03, pg. 19), explained thermal growth and its affect on
proper equipment alignment. A practical example involves a recent project
at a wastewater treatment plant in Cleveland that needed realistic cold
alignment targets for a 3600 rpm compressor.
How Unbalance Affects
Bearing Life
Mass unbalance in a rotating system often produces excessive synchronous
forces that reduce the life span of various mechanical elements. First
of all we will define unbalance case. Unbalance is basically very simple
case caused by an asymmetry in the rotating element that results in an
offset between the shaft centerline and center of mass (see Figure 1).
Asymmetry can be an off-center weight distribution, or it can be a thermal
mechanism that produces uneven heating and bowing of the rotor, or it
can be an electrical effect that produces uneven magnetic field |
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