>> THE TURNING OF THE SCREW - How a costly bearing failure
got the simple spanner treatment
Condition
Monitoring experts Monition, have shown that small mechanical problems,
can be both expensive and difficult to detect, after a fan bearing
which repeatedly failed and defied analysis, but was found by Monition
to be a simple case of balancing the anti-vibration mounts which
hold the fan bearing casing.
Monition’s
Senior Consulting Engineer, Bob Patterson explained that it wasn’t
quite as simple as it sounds however. “It wasn’t an
obvious cause of failure, and because the main symptom was excessive
heat build-up the natural assumption is that the cause is an internal
mechanical or bearing problem”.
The
faulty fan, part of a suite of three identical units, is used in
the drying process at Imperial Tobacco’s Nottingham plant.
The other two fan bearings were operating normally and recording
an operating temperature of around 35‘C. The faulty unit would
reach 102‘C and would regularly fail – costing in the
region of £500 for new bearings plus installation and productivity
losses. >>
READ MORE...
|
|
 |
