Remote monitoring saves catastrophic failure at Corus
Tuesday, 20 Oct 2009
It is reported that a preventive maintenance project at Corus' Lackenby plant has helped the steel giant save hefty six figure sums in downtime and capital investment. Two years of applying an intelligent gearbox monitoring system have allowed engineers to make key design modifications and improve their plant preventative maintenance regime.
In 2006, an online remote monitoring device known as DTECT X1 was installed on hot saws, which cut through 'H' section beams of hot steel as they exit the plant's beam mill, to determine their condition. The monitoring device highlighted problems with imbalances to the saw blades and gearbox lubrication. It became apparent that inherent design faults within the gearbox itself were causing regular bearing failures.
Mr Steve Bowman beam mill's manufacturing engineer in charge of the hot saws and finishing equipment said that "We have been experiencing failures on our gearboxes for a number of years now. By using the DTECT X1 system from Schaeffler, we've been able to pinpoint the exact source of these failures."
He added that "We noticed that bearing 'C' was suffering from oil starvation, so oil was diverted from bearing 'D'. By doing this, the running temperature of the bearing improved substantially."
Mr Bowman said that he now has the confidence to run the gearbox until the next planned outage, knowing that there won't be a catastrophic gearbox failure. He added that "With lost production costs due to unplanned downtime breaking into four figures per hour, this means I can now get a good nights' sleep."
