VIBRATION MONITORING IN THE PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE

Currently, manufacturers and operating organizations seek to operate gas turbine engines (GTE) as part of gas pumping stations from their technical condition. This allows you to reduce the cost of operation, increase the service life, reduce labor costs for maintenance, timely repair. Of great importance in this regard is the equipment of units with modern systems that allow you to diagnose the technical condition in the process of their work, among which a special place is occupied by vibration diagnostics with modern means of analog and digital computers. Unlike aircraft engines, turbine units of gas pumping stations are an object where vibration diagnostics can be implemented in its entirety. This is due to the operation of turbines in almost the same modes for a long time, which allows you to organize the so-called trend control of any feature or set of them used for diagnostic purposes. In some industries, maintenance is the second largest or even the largest element of operating costs and thus becomes a priority for cost control. Equipment failure affects not only the availability of the installation, but also the safety, environment and product quality. It can also affect customer service in terms of missed deadlines and loss of trust. The complexity and cost of modern installations and equipment means that monitoring the condition of installations is now a much more cost-effective option. Although many industries still respond to maintenance because there are no advanced costs, they pay a price due to increased downtime or loss of production. Vibration monitoring is still perhaps the most widely used method of predictive maintenance and, according to a rare with the exception, it can be applied to a wide range of rotating equipment. Vibration monitoring allows you to determine the condition of the equipment during its operation and to identify those elements that begin to show signs of wear before they really fail, sometimes catastrophically. With this approach, unplanned downtimes are reduced or eliminated, which increases the availability and efficiency of the installation and reduces costs in addition to an experienced vibration analyzer. However, in the case of rolling bearings, the characteristic vibrating signatures are often formed in the form of modulation of the basic frequencies of the bearings. This can be used to advantage, and vibration control software is often designed to detect these characteristics and provide early warning of an approaching problem. This usually takes the form of a demodulation of the signal and the envelope spectrum, indicating early deterioration of the rolling / sliding surface of the contact surfaces.