Any plant that operates complex, expensive, or even dangerous equipment is familiar with machinery protection systems. Ensuring that equipment will be shut down in the case of an emergency is a primary goal for these organizations, both to keep personnel and the public safe, and to ensure that any damage from a failure is minimized, helping ensure repairs are less costly and more efficient.
However, as Emerson’s Erik Lindhjem shares in a recent article in Chemical Engineering, plants today need to focus on more than catastrophic failure avoidance if they want to compete in the modern marketplace. A protection system trip means an outage, and an outage means costly downtime, even if it’s short. Better, then, to avoid the risk of outages altogether. And that’s where a new protection system can make all the difference.
Traditional machinery protection creates silos
For decades, machinery protection has been set and forget. The systems were installed, and teams assume they work as expected. Modern systems, however, offer far more functionality, making them a critical part of any boundless automation strategy. Believe it or not, the protection system can be a data silo if it isn’t modernized. Consider, if you run a legacy protection system that is many decades old, with no visibility into its operation, you cannot ever be sure that it is actually functional.
But it doesn’t take a worst-case scenario for a protection system to underperform. Even if the maintenance team has visibility into the health of the protection system itself,
“Most traditional protection systems are not designed to also support the predictive data necessary for providing advanced warning of developing problems. They may alert maintenance teams that vibration is high, and that protection systems will likely —if properly maintained—shut off the machine before catastrophic failure occurs, but by the time the system triggers, equipment has likely undergone significant damage, and operations have likely suffered from poor performance for some time.”
Modern machinery protection helps drive operational excellence
Best-in-class modern protection systems like Emerson’s AMS 6500 ATG provide prediction capabilities for advanced warning of developing problems in equipment. The system’s flexible cards can be configured to collect prediction data and deliver it to mobile devices anywhere on the plant network to help technicians stay ahead of developing issues with their most critical machinery.
In addition, the AMS 6500 ATG can be seamlessly integrated into AMS Machinery Manager, which provides a more global view of plant health,
“Using machinery health software, the team can collect and store data from multiple machines in a single location, where they can use comprehensive analysis tools to assess the health of every piece of equipment quickly and easily.”
Armed with real-time health information for critical, essential, and balance-of-plant equipment—all in an easy-to-understand format and available in the palm of a technician’s hand—the team can much more easily see the data from their protection and prediction systems in the context of operational data, helping them deliver not just the maintenance, but also operational changes necessary to operate at optimal efficiency.
In the full article over at Chemical Engineering, Erik elaborates on the benefits of modern machinery protection and provides some real-world examples of modernized protection systems in action. Check it out to see how modernizing your protection system may be the perfect step for improving operational excellence across your facility, or, potentially, even your entire enterprise.
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