Billy Hurley, Digital Editorial Manager

Machines, specifically rotating equipment like pumps, fans, and compressors, account for 85 percent of GDP, according to a 2017 report from McKinsey Global Institute.

When one piece of equipment goes down, the consequences can range from a minor inconvenience – like downtime on one manufacturing line – to pump failures that lead to floods or lack of water.

“In the pump industry specifically, it’s a human problem,” said Chad Flowe, a senior reliability and customer success manager at the Denmark-based pump manufacturer Grundfos. “It’s not just about getting product out the door.” Flowe has experience walking through a plant and understanding a facility’s most important equipment.

So which machines require continuous monitoring and which machines call for spot-checking?

The answer is complicated, says Flowe, but one that involves the idea of “Criticality.”

In a live presentation on TechBriefs.com titled Effective Power Management: Minimizing Downtime and Maximizing Efficiency, an attendee had the following question for the Grundfos manager:

“How do I determine which equipment to monitor continuously?”

Read Flowe’s machinery health monitoring tips in his edited response below.

Chad Flowe: That’s a tricky one, right? It’s going to depend on the application. If you have an industrial processing plant, their needs and costs are going to be different than a water utility.

You’ll need to understand the criticality of the equipment, as well as maintenance strategies and things of that nature. You’ll have to look at the consequences of downtime for the particular piece of equipment:

What is the lead time on a replacement?

How much of the plant is tied into that?

If that piece of equipment fails, is only one line going to be down? Or is the whole plant going to be down?

Is there easy redundancy, or can things be switched around?

[The questions] change in every plan, but it’s all going to boil down to the cost of downtime.

In the case of a water utility, it’s not about financially being down — it’s about not suppling water to customers. So, that’s a big one.

It really depends. One of the easy rules of thumb is: You really want to continuously monitor anything over 100 horsepower.

But even the smaller pumps [may need to be monitored], if they’re in a critical application and you really can’t afford for them to go down. Or you at least need a decent heads-up before they go down. It’s all about how you define criticality in your operation.

Machine Health & Asset Monitoring in Industrial Applications: A Look at Sensor Technologies

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