Respond to All Alerts Promptly
The Vibration Analyst team wants your machines running as smoothly as possible. To do that, we need to:
- ensure that machine health statuses are accurate
- mitigate the risk of fast-developing failures
You can help us meet these goals by making it a priority to answer the questions we ask.
Vibration Analysts at Augury choose machine health levels based on the risk of failure, not just ISO levels, to reflect urgency. Even if a machine is at a lower risk of failure, such as a Monitor health status, it doesn’t mean it’s okay to ignore.
The reasons a machine might be placed in a Monitor status can be grouped into two large categories:
- Vibration levels are above ISO standards, OEM standards, or similar machine types, but the risk of failure is low and unchanged.
- Vibration levels are increasing or there are symptoms suggesting component wear (belts, bearings, coupling, gears, impeller, rotor bars, etc) but the risk of failure is still low based on the amplitudes and vibration signature.
In both cases, we still recommend you take some action. For example, you may want to ensure the bearings or gears have adequate lubrication. Or you may need to balance the fan or align the pump. Improving the vibration will decrease wear to the components and extend their life. But knowing that you are busy and may have higher priorities on any given day (anything from shoveling the sidewalks to replacing the leaking seals, to installing that new heat exchanger) we will leave the machine in Monitor until we see the symptoms worsen and the risk of failure has increased. Sometimes that can occur in a matter of hours and sometimes it can take years.
At times, we are missing information that would affect which category we assign: Acceptable, Monitor, Alarm, or Danger. In those cases, we will often reach out to you through the machine event thread to get the critical information we need. We recommend treating these messages with the same urgency as a Danger alert. Please note that this is not a call to go repair something right away, but rather a call to reply to us as soon as possible.
Diagnosing machines we have never put our eyes, ears, and hands-on, and where we don’t have access to historical records, schematics, or additional troubleshooting tools is a challenge. 99% of the time, the data collected by Augury Endpoints and found in the machine information is enough for us to accurately diagnose the machine's severity and be very close on the fault condition. However, occasionally the data changes in an unexpected way and operational conditions create symptoms that mimic fault conditions.
On other occasions, missing machine information (such as driven shaft rpms or unknown forcing frequencies) makes determining a fault condition and severity more difficult. These are situations we may ask a question in the machine event thread before we change the health status. Often, we will simultaneously set an additional threshold on one of the trends that worsened in case we don’t receive a timely response. This allows us to downgrade the health status if the data continues to worsen, but there is always a risk that once it is triggered, we will not review that subsequent ticket in time.
We understand how busy you are. Many of us worked on maintenance teams for decades. Our goal is to choose health statuses that allow you to prioritize work appropriately. At times, we rely on you to help us make the right decision.