Electric Motors • Perfomance Systems
Don’t you love when a motor fails on you in your plant and come to find out you didn’t even know that motor was there or even worse there is no spare? Now you have unwanted downtime, rush repair costs/rushing in a new motor, rigging cost and an unwanted hit to your budget. This then makes you realize there could be another piece of equipment in your facility that you don’t know about, that is vital in your process.
One of the biggest differences between horizontal motors and vertical motors is the bearing arrangement. Typically, the bearing arrangement inside a vertical motor consists of one or more thrust bearings and a guide bearing. The thrust bearing is commonly mounted on the top of the motor and the guide bearing is located on the bottom. The typical thrust bearings found in a vertical motor are one or more angular contact bearings, a spherical roller bearing, or a hydrodynamic plate bearing, lubricated in an oil bath reservoir. The axial force is either upward, downward or balanced, and is generally the factor used to size the thrust bearing. As the thrust becomes greater, the bearing size or quantity of bearings normally increases.
When looking to upgrade or purchase a spare medium voltage or ANEMA (above NEMA) motor it can be very intimidating. You have different enclosures, bearing designs, accessories, and about 100 manufacturers that would love to sell you a motor. You will also need take a good look at the driven equipment and your plant equipment to see what issues this upgrade/spare motor may cause. Wouldn’t it be nice to send everything you need to one place and have them do all the work? But that isn’t always the case.
A philosophy of our company has always been to help whenever we can. We have the resources, experience, and mindset to bring solutions to our customers on almost every motor related issue. Often times we are asked to bring solutions and answer questions to problems in breakdown situations without all of the facts. These breakdown situation questions can either be on motors that have been sent into our shop or motors that are still in-service.
Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) is becoming more common in large motors purchases and repair validation. Many end users are starting to establish specifications that include every test imaginable to ensure that the motor is designed and built to the specification provided and will last as long as current technology and testing procedures allow.
Just like in our everyday relationships, we tend to stay with a person or business because we have been “using them for years", but are they helping you or do you feel obligated to stay with them? Have you been using the same car mechanic forever, but your car still has the same issues?
Would you continue to use that vendor?
Far more than a data collection tool, IRIS M is RDI’s patented technology that turns millions of pixels from a camera image into millions of data points that can be monitored, read, and analyzed for critical manufacturing machinery, operations, quality control and other factors that affect plant reliability and productivity. For the first time ever, you can now see movement that is invisible during real time.
In the industrial environment there is a constant stream of new technologies coming to market that claim to be able to increase up-time and reliability. All of these new tools and high tech gadgets generally provide one thing... data. Collecting data and then knowing what to do with it, in a very broad sense, is one of the most important thing that you can do to increase reliability. Take for instance vibration monitoring devices that collect machine data on rotating equipment, they are incredibly valuable predictors of failures assuming one has the knowledge to determine what the collected data means for that piece of equipment. Seeing a trend towards failure on a unit gives you the opportunity to be proactive instead of reactive, like having a spare on hand and scheduling a change over.
There are a few of us old timers still around who would say that straight edge or string alignment is good enough. At that time and for certain applications that was actually good enough. Now we have state of the art tools that we can use to get us a near perfect shaft alignment. But do I need near perfect? What will that extra bit of time get me and is it worth the time?
In the final post in this 8 part case study series, you will see Todd Hatfield explain the final assembly of the 5500HP, 13,200v, synchronous motor in the clip below from a presentation given at the 2018 RPM Symposium.
The presentation below covers:
