“It’s Always the Motors Fault” : Decatur Industrial Breaks Down the Myth
We’ve seen it before – a plant experiences repeated motor failures and calls in a motor shop to fix the motor. The only issue is sometimes the problem lies elsewhere.
Your average motor shop will repair the motor and send it back into the plant. The problem with that scenario is the root cause of the failure is never identified which means continued downtime and high repair costs for the plant. As a Strategic Partner in Reliability Solutions for our Customers, Decatur Industrial goes beyond repairing the motor and completes a 360 degree root cause failure analysis.
This type of strategic approach allowed us to help a large coal-fired generating plant that had been experiencing repeated drive motor failures. Decatur Industrial worked collaboratively with Customer Engineering to identify the contributing factors of the premature failures and short life-span of the drive motors with the goal of eliminating emergency downtime and catastrophic equipment failures.
Findings disclosed structural looseness in the foundation and hardware that secured the motors and blowers. This looseness contributed to misalignment and excessive vibration levels – both of which reduce life-span of motors and drive components. These findings allowed the customer to take corrective actions and implement predictive maintenance and reliability practices.
These findings amounted to hard cost savings as the customer had been spending $140,000 annually on repairs of motors and blowers due to failures that had nothing to do with the motor integrity.