Innovating Bearing Failure Analysis for South American Quarry with Sensoteq Tau

The customer was responsible for maintaining a large banana screener at a remote site in South America. They had constant problems with bearing failure causing frustration for the end user, as they could not predict when the bearings would fail. 

Screens purposely create a large rotating pattern to separate materials of different sizes. The large vibrating profile of the pattern can cause challenges when attempting to monitor the small vibration signals that a faulty bearing would generate. Existing wired sensing technology is very prone to failure within the cabling, and is not appropriate for this application.

Implemented Solution

The customer installed Sensoteq’s Tau Bearing and Tau Structure sensors onto the screen to gather more information. By moving to a wireless, battery-powered solution, the risk of broken cabling is removed.

Findings

Within weeks of the sensors being installed an automated alarm was generated, signalling a high-frequency anomaly was detected on Analytix. The frequencies generated were indicative of those associated with a bearing fault and the waveform showed clear impacting.

Analysis

“Power bands” within the spectrum highlighted a problem area.

Impacting can be seen in the waveform. After a high pass filter, this is even more evident.

Recommendation

Replace the damaged bearing and continue monitoring.

Outcome

Thanks to Tau's analysis, Alarm levels dropped to normal levels, and no impacting is evident in the waveform.

“Power bands” within the spectrum highlighted return to normal levels.

Impacting is no longer visible in the waveform.

Looking at the crest factor trend, it is visible to see the increase in the parameter up to the point of replacement (event 1 highlighted on the graph). After replacement, the parameter returns to a more expected value.