Why is it always fans?

In my previous position as Regional Sales Manager for an equipment manufacturer in the reliability space, one of my responsibilities was to provide onsite demos of our equipment for prospective customers. When speaking to the customers prior to the visit, I was always happy to hear the words “we have a fan we would like you to demonstrate your equipment on”. Why was I happy to hear those words? Almost every fan I have ever encountered had excess vibration, looseness, poor base design, and often unbalance issues. Why are the majority of fans in industry under designed, poorly installed, and under maintained? We did it to ourselves!!! Allow me to explain how.

Fans are usually purchased as a unit. The fan, motor, and base are typically assembled by the manufacturer and delivered to the end user as a unit. So why is it the end users fault that fans show up with poor design? WE ARE CHEAP!!! Years upon years of purchasing fans from the lowest bidder has forced the fan manufacturers to use the minimum amount of raw material and labor in the construction of the fans just to keep the lights on. If they do not do it, the fan manufacturer across town will. A fan that has been engineered with the minimum amount of steel often operates just below critical speeds. What does this mean? In layman’s terms, it is very sensitive to being operated outside of its design parameters. If operated as designed and delivered, it will likely provide years of trouble-free service. However, we all know that is most often not the case.

Once we get our hands on the it, the happy brand-new fan gets put to work, where we do all kinds of mean things to it while expecting it to keep moving air from one place to another. By nature of their design, fans are very prone to unbalance due to wear, or buildup of material on the fan blades. This increasing unbalance goes to work on the foundation of the fan like a million tiny hammers. Once the foundation, or structure of the fan begins to degrade, the vibration begins to increase very slowly. Over time, bolts begin to loosen, grout and concrete begins to crack, and welds begin to fail. From here, the vibration begins to increase exponentially until we notice it, or the machine fails. Proactively monitoring the structure, base, and duct work is a great way to audit the overall health of the fan. Motion Amplification is a great technology for this as it allows you to acquire an enormous amount of data in a short amount of time. In the same amount of time it would take to acquire traditional Vibration analysis on only the bearings of the fan , you can have accurate vibration data, on the fan, motor, base, structure, and all the duct work attached to the fan.

The Motion Amplification video attached is a great example of an “as found” MA video shot on a fan. Doing an MA audit on your facilities equipment is a great way to proactively check the health of your facilities assets. The MA videos provide very valuable, actionable data that often is all that is required to begin improvements on machines shown to have elevated vibration or defects.

Industrial Electric Machinery is proud to offer full PDM services including Motion Amplification Using RDI Technologies Iris M platform!

#motionamplification