Delaying End of Life

Everything, including motors, has an end of life. Our reliability goal is to identify conditions conducive to failure and correct them so the end of life doesn’t come early. Have you ever noticed that a motor tends to wait until the weekend or when you are on vacation to fail? Because of this unwritten rule, we must have a standardized troubleshooting procedure in place to quickly identify the source of the anomalies reported. With the right information, the reliability team can take the fastest track to prevent or recover from an unscheduled outage. A critical question to approach troubleshooting would be, “Is the motor running or has it tripped?” This tip will discuss some troubleshooting guidelines when the motor is still running. Our fault zone analysis approach focuses on power quality, power circuit, stator, rotor and air gap. Poor power quality could result in elevated vibration, overload and high temperatures, or excessive startup times. A quick power test using the EMAX test equipment can clear the power quality and power circuit as a source of imbalance-driven vibration, low-voltage overloads, or longer-than-expected startup times. Being able to clear the power supply and power circuit allows you to focus on the motor and machine train elements as the source of the problem. We’ll discuss the motor and machine train troubleshooting in a future tip.

To listen to a discussion on Troubleshooting for Electric Motor Reliability, visit our PdMA YouTube Channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ACW-AZddtQ .