Balancing checks after cleaning
Efficient maintenance trough condition monitoring
For one of the largest producers of insulation materials relies for its Condition Monitoring measurements on Van Geffen VMS for many years. A large number of fans, pumps and line drives are monitored in this program. Because of the large demand for the products it is commercially from the upmost importance to reduce the production downtime for maintenance to an absolute minimum. Inbetween the planned outage in summer and winter there is a full 24/7 production planning with minimum time for cleaning and repair activities.
Polluting, cleaning & balancing
A side effect of this production of insulation material is the large quantity of pollution in ao. the fans caused by dust, glue and residual glass fibres. This pollution causes imbalance and high vibrations which makes regular cleaning necessary.
On average a production line is stopped once every 6 weeks for cleaning and maintenance. Such an in-between stop takes up about 20 hours. It is however not possible to clean all the fans within this short stop. The periodic vibration measurements are performed about 1 week before the scheduled stop. In consideration with the customer a maximum allowable value was decided for the imbalance level. Only those fans which cross the allowable imbalance level are cleaned during this stop.
In the last few hours of the production stop we perform new vibration measurements and a balance check on the cleaned fans. Any residual imbalance is detected directly after which a field balancing will resolve the imbalance.
This strategy has the mayor advantage that only those fans that actually need to be cleaned or maintained are attended to. The time saved with unnecessary visual inspections and cleaning enables the manufacturer to shorten the in-between stops, leading to more time available for production. The vibration measurement at the end of the stop period also provide the assurance that all cleaning and maintenance activities are performed correctly, preventing unpleasant surprises during production.