You’ve got to love Ben Franklin. It’s no small irony that, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is attributed to the man whose image is on our $100 bill. Indeed, many Benjamin’s stand to be saved by recognizing system failures before they happen.
Regal Power Transmission Solutions is introducing its new mill-drive condition monitoring program at AISTech. The technology monitors drive dynamics, gives a real-time snapshot of system health, and sends alerts when vibration and torque values exceed threshold limits. With this new technology, the system has already produced documented savings of millions of dollars in unplanned downtime for a major U.S. steel producer.
The program includes development and installation of custom turnkey monitoring systems for long-term users, as well as short-term troubleshooting and diagnostics. The program helps users with the design, retrofit/rebuilding and installation of components that increase drivetrain reliability. The program does so by using Kop-Flex and Jaure mill couplings, Milwaukee custom gearing, Leeson and Marathon motors and bearings from Rollway and Sealmaster.
“This technology allows mills to move from emergency maintenance to planned downtime, which is a major competitive advantage in an industry that traditionally operates with a ‘run-to-failure’ model and endures up to $2,000 per minute for unplanned downtime,” said Dennis Craig, Senior Metals Marketing Specialist for Regal Power Transmission Solutions.
“We offer long-term monitoring or diagnostic services, and can provide the customer a turnkey system that is tailored to their equipment. We can also access a customer’s system remotely if there’s a need for joint review of a data related to a particular event.”
Craig also said the new monitoring technology compares real-time torque and vibration values with known limits of drive components to help improve process conditions, machinery health and maintenance planning.
What really makes the technology effective though, is the speed of data sampling and analysis.
“Our turnkey systems use high-sampling-rate data acquisition and algorithms to perform analyses in seconds that used to take weeks. This is the only way to capture short-term torsional oscillation, chatter and torque overloads caused by cold-end slabs, cobble and other conditions. These overloads can be masked by the high inertia in these drivetrains, which makes motor current/speed unreliable measurement parameters. We obtain fault limit values from the drive’s component manufacturers and use those values in our software to compare against real-time conditions. We can detect spalls on bearings at the microscopic level and plot them. A trained person can look at the graphic displays and tell if an issue is urgent or not.”
For short term situations where mill workers have failures with a particular component but cannot diagnose the cause, the monitoring program can analyze the drivetrain and produce empirical data to suggest what the problem is, and how to fix it.
Torque and vibration mitigation
Kop-Flex and Jaure couplings are widely used in the metals and turbomachinery industries. The two companies manufacture flexible gear couplings, flexible disc couplings, gear spindles, flexible grid couplings, resilient couplings, coupling torque limiters and other designs. Kop-Flex’s Max C resilient coupling is one of several proven options already used to mitigate torque spikes and vibration in mill drives.
Regal also provides bearings through its Rollway and Sealmaster businesses. Rollway Bearing produces cylindrical radial, cylindrical thrust, tapered thrust and steel cage journal roller bearings in standard and custom designs. These include models for high-temperature, tandem thrust designs, double-acting designs and others. Sealmaster produces mounted ball and roller bearing, including custom designs with special seals, application specific greases, custom tolerances and other performance specifications. To learn more visit Regal at their AISTech’s booth No. 2371.
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