Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) is an approach to the maintenance of equipment that uses established parameters to determine how effectively components are operating, thereby providing information about when maintenance is necessary, rather than working to a specific schedule. Sensors within equipment can monitor its real-time performance, providing engineers with valuable information about changes in its operation, so they know when to act to prevent problems from escalating.
Many manufacturing companies opt to use a Planned Maintenance schedule to ensure their equipment is kept in optimum operational condition. Similar to booking a car in for an annual service or when it reaches a pre-defined mileage, Planned Maintenance of manufacturing equipment is carried out at scheduled times. While this does allow for downtime to be planned in advance, it can mean servicing takes place more often than necessary and doesn’t guarantee that a problem fault won’t appear before the service.
Condition Based Maintenance occurs when equipment displays the warning signs that components are beginning to fail. Therefore, the production line is interrupted only when necessary and for a limited duration, as faults or failures are quickly and easily identified. Intervals between maintenance tend to be longer than with Planned Maintenance, with no increase in the frequency of breakdowns, meaning the production line can operate with fewer interruptions, higher efficiency, and lower costs.
Effective Condition Based Maintenance depends on a stream of real-time, accurate data about the operational performance of components within manufacturing equipment. Whereas Planned Maintenance is based on several variables identified and calculated by the manufacturer using informed assumptions about the equipment, Condition Based Maintenance is determined by confirmed information provided by sensors. Therefore, production line operatives and managers can be more confident that servicing and repairs are necessary and can target the components that require refurbishment or replacement, rather than carrying out an exhaustive, time-consuming and expensive general service.
At Sensonics Ltd, we work cooperatively with your business to plan and install a condition monitoring system to provide you with invaluable information about the status of your equipment. The SentryCMS condition monitoring system provides flexible data acquisition and powerful analysis so you can monitor the performance of critical equipment.
With the ability to acquire data from up to 32 different sensors and eight-phase reference channels per Sentry G3 VAM, SentryCMS can store asynchronous samples and order locked processed data, guaranteeing that every vibration event is identified and reported. Detailed analysis is provided by SentryCMS software, in a variety of formats such as orbit, bode, polar, FFT, bar graph, and the Nyquist Frequency.
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