Improved Rotating Equipment Maintenance - Polyester Textiles

Automated wireless vibration monitoring improves safety and exposes rotating equipment (rollers, driers, etc.) conditions in polyester textile production lines.

A major polymer company operates chemical textiles plants that uses polyester as a raw material. There are many rotating machines installed in the polyester textile production process. 

Due to large number of equipment, they were not monitored or maintained properly, and sudden breakdowns occurred, leading to serious accidents.

Challenges

In the textile production process, there are many rotating equipment such as roll stands to wind the textiles and fans to dry them. Traditionally, maintenance of these equipment was carried out by operators using hand-held vibration sensors.

Due to the large area to be monitored and the large number of equipment, it was impractical for a small number of vibration experts to make timely rounds, diagnosing all the equipment in detail. As a result, signs of abnormalities in the equipment were missed and it caused fires. Additionally, due to differences in the measurement skills and the operations of each plant, there were sometimes variations in the measurement results and their decisions.

Solutions

By installing Sushi Sensor XS770A, which automatically measures the vibration values of equipment, the following was achieved:

1. High frequency data collection, which would be difficult to achieve with conventional handheld sensor-based operator rounds.
2. Digitization of collected data and trend monitoring based on accumulated data.
3. Trend monitoring detected developing equipment issues so appropriate maintenance actions could be taken at an early stage. This made it possible to focus on equipment that needed detailed diagnosis and to schedule time for effective operation and equipment inspection planning.
4. The variation in measurement points and operator-dependent methods was reduced by the automatic vibration measurement of XS770A. This prevented the hassle and confusion of comparing measurement data from different measurement methods and made it possible to manage equipment using a uniform index.
5. LoRaWAN’s® long-range wireless technology enabled a single gateway to cover all monitored equipment, which were scattered throughout the plant. This has created a much greater cost advantage than other solutions.

Key Benefits

Screw or magnet mounted sensors measure vibration (velocity and acceleration) along the X, Y, and Z axes and 3-axis composite in addition to monitoring the surface temperature.

• Hazardous location installation – Zone 2 areas
• Long distance communication – Six miles (10 km) or more
• Excellent environmental resistance​ and battery powered
• Monitoring and abnormal condition detection via on-premise server or a cloud server​