Machinery health management saves EUR 10,000

Machinery health analysers reduce costs by minimising unexpected plant shutdowns and extending scheduled maintenance periods and saved EUR 10,000 on one incident for a user.

Emerson Process Management's Machinery Health Management technologies have enabled BASF Antwerp, Belgium, to maximise plant output and reduce costs through the introduction of a maintenance strategy based on predictive intelligence.

BASF Antwerp implemented a predictive maintenance strategy ten years ago based on the collection and analysis of vibration data using Emerson's CSI Machinery Health Analysers.

Moving from a time-based regime to a predictive approach has resulted in significant cost savings and fewer equipment breakdowns.

In the future, BASF will continue to practice predictive maintenance while undertaking Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) to enable a move towards proactive maintenance.

"Using Emerson's Machinery Health Analysers and AMS Suite: Machinery Health Manager software, has enabled us to detect critical problems that could not have been seen before," said Johan De Wever, rotating engineering specialist, BASF.

"These problems include bearing cage problems and potential faults with slow speed machinery.

Last year we were able to make significant savings as a result of our predictive maintenance programme." BASF monitors approximately 3,000 machines.

An example of problems that were detected with the aid of Emerson's diagnostic technologies was a defective bearing cage in a fan that was used for drying chalk.

Failure of the fan could have caused a production outage and two days of lost production worth approximately EUR 10,000.

There could also have been secondary damage to the machine, such as a bent shaft or failed bearing.

However, the problem was found before a functional failure occurred, and the impact on production was significantly reduced.

BASF has also been able to use vibration monitoring to extend the period between bearing replacements on fertiliser production machinery.

"Emerson's technologies played an important role in preventing lost production due to an extended downtime in the incident with the chalk drying fan," continued De Wever.

"We feel confident that our relationship with Emerson plays a part in keeping our strong market position.

These tools have allowed our team to grow our core competencies to include troubleshooting, multi-channel analysis, and ODS (Operating Deflection Shapes) analysis.

We have been able to use our own expertise, along with Emerson technologies, to watch over a broad scope of assets across this huge facility and to prevent problems before they occur." The latest machinery health analyser from Emerson Process Management is the CSI 2130 which features a high resolution, backlit full colour display, large internal memory, expandable memory and optional Ethernet communications.

The CSI 2130 uploads collected data for analysis, trending and reporting to AMS Machinery Manager software, a key element of Emerson's PlantWeb digital plant architecture.

These capabilities make the CSI 2130 the most versatile and comprehensive unit available for maintaining the health of rotating machinery.

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