Vibration protection for smaller critical plant

Improving efficiencies, reducing energy consumption and eliminating downtime has never been more important than in today’s highly competitive industrial environment. Whether generating power, pumping essential fluidsor driving process equipment, it is vital to monitor machinery dynamic behaviour and protect processes from the disruption and expense of unscheduled downtime.

As a consequence continuous protection and monitoring is an essential requirement for critical rotating plant across every industry sector. However, the cost of sophisticated protection systems can be difficult to justifyfor smaller machinery operating on less critical applications, although the requirement for monitoring still needs to be addressed.

The solution is cost-effective and compact machinery protection monitoring devices such as those developed by condition monitoring specialist SENSONICS. A good example is their DN26 G3 protection monitor, which provides practical and affordable protection for smaller plant and equipment such as, pumps, fans, motors, centrifuges, turbines, or any item of small to medium industrial machinery.

A recent project success for the DN26G3 is the Boasteel Zhanjing Steel plant in China where over 90 modules are utilised with Sensonics sensors to monitor critical plant. These include the main exhaust fans in the blast furnace, the vaporising fans in the continuous casting line and de-dusting fans in the steel making and sintering unit; providing vibration protection to over 30 fans in total.

The Zhanjing plant has a first phase capacity of 9 million t per annum and is one of the most advanced steel plants in China with low emissions and high energy efficiency. The high-performance Din Rail mountable DN26 G3 unit is capable of monitoring two channels of bearing vibration, shaft vibration, or shaft position and offers fully programmable signal conditioning with a range of measurement algorithms and sensor options.

In addition the DN26 G3 offers a dedicated speed monitor channel, which can also be utilised as a phase reference for harmonic analysis of the vibration signals. The unit is designed for optimum flexibility; as a universal module (single hardware platform) it is field upgradable and can be programmed for any of the measurement options detailed above. It is available with mains voltage or +24Vdc power supply options.

The sensor interface is programmable to accept IEPE type accelerometers/velometers, proximity probes (API 670 standard), and active / passive speed probes. All sensor signals are available via a buffered interface, which provides the option of further detailed analysis if required. Three alarm relays are available as standard (expandable to up to seven relays via a digital interface), one dedicated to indicate module and sensor integrity, the other two relays are fully programmable across the alarm criteria selected. All three input channels measured values are available via a 4 - 20 mA interface.

The unit is available with Ethernet communications as standard, permitting configuration either locally or remotely through the inbuilt web server and offering Modbus over TCPIP for connecting measured data to other plant wide systems. The DN26 G3 features a built-in intuitive colour LCD display and menu drive facility providing various display modes including an alarm historian with real time logging capability.

Edited from source by Stephanie Roker

Read the article online at: https://www.worldpipelines.com/equipment-and-safety/30032016/vibration-protection-for-smaller-critical-plant/