How often do your machines fail unexpectedly?
We will tell you how to prevent this in the future using accelerometers. This type of sensors is widely used to measure vibrations of rotating machine components. Vibration signal contains a very useful information about their condition. Analysis of timewaves acquired by accelerometer allows for the calculation of diagnostic parameters and early detection of potential failures, such as bearing wear or unbalance caused by dust deposited on the fan blades. Early identification of problem enables you to plan repairs and maintenance of the machine, which prevents unexpected production downtime and reduces unplanned costs.
Accelerometers can be divided into piezoelectric, piezoresistive, thermal and MEMS (microelectromechanical). The most popular in industrial applications are piezoelectric sensors. They meet all requirements of machine parts condition assessment. The incredible development of integrated circuit manufacturing technology made it possible to introduce accelerometers made as silicon chips. They are called MEMS (MicroElectroMechanical System) and are characterized by small size, low weight, shock resistance and extremely low power consumption. They consist of a spring and a mass housed in a chip. Sometimes, their manufacturers integrate in the same IC signal processing circuits, analog-to-digital converter and even microcontroller making them ideal for use in smart IoT sensors.
The development of MEMS accelerometers was driven by smartphone market. That’s why resolution, amplitude and frequency bandwidth of most of the available sensors are limited. Their usage in predictive maintenance is limited to a standard based general condition evaluation of the machine. The most popular is ISO20816. If you use it in your preventive actions, pay attention that it has different parts which cover different types of machines and their parameters. Not all condition monitoring tools take it into consideration.
There are some common machine faults, like bearing or gear wheel degradation, which requires acquisition of signals in frequency range reaching 20 kHz. Immediate response to emerging machine problems requires high resolution and accuracy of measurements. Alitec answer to these TPM requirements is CL@VE – our new IoT sensor you will meet coming days. It is equipped with two different grade MEMS accelerometers to ensure wide application range and accurate diagnosis of machine issue. MEMS acoustic and ultrasound sensor integrated in the device gives you a whole new range of possibilities. With CL@VE, you will not only detect damage to rotating machine components, but also analyze vibrations of building structures and the ground.
Accelerometers are an indispensable tool in modern vibration diagnostics. Thanks to them, you are able to evaluate the condition of objects of different kind, find and predict potential failures and plan maintenance work in advance.