General News Archives - Page 11 of 15 - Decatur Industrial Electric

Motor Maintenance Program Catches Potential Safety Hazard

We can do extensive multi-point inspections of all your rotating equipment, but sometimes the biggest problems are the easiest to find.

To put it simply, the goal of a motor maintenance program is to stop problems before they occur! Preventive motor maintenance on a regular basis can help prevent motors to fail and thus, prevent unexpected production stops. That’s where WE come in!

With this customer, Decatur Industrial works with them to run a motor maintenance program. Our techs are trained to check for overheating of motors, bearing failures, and many other potential issues.

In this picture you see a cracked coupling. Our technician spotted this on a schedule walk-around. We were able to avoid this near failure as well as safety issue. It could have sent debris or coupling pieces flying.

The customer was able to avoid a failure (and potential safety incident) and have it replaced quickly.

Fault Zone Series: Part 1 Power Quality

Sticking to the Fault Zone approach to electric motor troubleshooting we are starting this series with Power Quality. “You are what you eat,” is what you were told as a child when your parents were trying to get you to eat healthy foods. Well, the same is true for your electric motor. The motor’s health is based in part on whether you feed it good clean power quality. Many electric motor fault zones are related to heat and Power Quality is no different. Poor power quality makes a motor work harder than designed to deliver the horsepower required by the load. A 100HP motor with poor power quality may require 110HP worth of current to deliver the requested 100HP. This extra current increases the heating of a motor beyond its design temperature and will reduce the life of the motor. Identifying power quality issues like excessive harmonics and voltage imbalances early will allow you to reduce the load of a motor when possible until you can correct the issues and extend the life of your motor. For more examples of Power Quality anomalies and Power Quality standards applied to your electric motor reliability visit MCEMAX Fault Zone- Power Quality on the PdMA YouTube Channel.

Meet Steven Leinard – Manager of Quality and Engineering

Decatur Industrial is pleased to announce that Steven Leinard has the joined the team as the Manager of Quality and Engineering. This is an integral role in serving out our promise of exceptional service and quality to customers.

This position is a natural fit for Leinard, coming to Decatur Industrial with a background in management in regulated industries such as pharmaceutical, bulk foods, bulk ingredients, and the US Navy.

“We have an established quality system that I am looking forward to overseeing and improving upon,” said Leinard. “Consistently working to improve our operations and processes is something I am very passionate about.”

Think Transformers.

The rotor of an AC Induction motor is like the secondary circuit of a transformer. It is easy to imagine that any change to the number of turns in the secondary of a transformer, would certainly affect the circuit performance of the transformers primary windings. Well, the rotor bars of the induction motor could be compared to the winding turns in the secondary of a transformer. Changing the conductivity or resistance in any way on the rotor cage of an induction motor would be like modifying the number of turns on a transformer secondary. So, if we consider the induction motor rotor cage as a comparison to a transformer secondary, then what part of the induction motor would be compared to the transformer primary? You guessed it… the stator windings. Any resistance change to the rotor cage of an induction motor will impact the circuit characteristics (inductance) of the stator windings. Therefore, monitoring the stator winding inductance of an induction motor is a great method of trending the condition of the rotor cage.

Credit: PdMA

New Year Motor Reliability Tip

It’s the beginning of a new year and time to remind ourselves of the need for an annual review of our alarm setpoints. We should annually review the setpoints to make sure they are not too conservative resulting in nuisance alarms, or too liberal resulting in missed indications leading to unexpected failures. Electric motor windings and insulation technology does change so it is critical to check in with your equipment vendors during this review to identify any default setpoint changes they recommend and to learn of any new tests or alarms that have been added through software updates. Be careful not to allow a more conservative setpoint established by your equipment vendor to overwrite a local setpoint developed from experience with onsite analytics and historical knowledge. Pay close attention to any application or system changes that would demand a new baseline for alarm setpoint establishment and learning.

Many alarms are based on a comparison to baseline so once the baseline is completed it is important to establish these alarm setpoints. Although your equipment vendors should be keeping you abreast of industry standard changes, it is a good idea to check in with the high profile standards for any changes affecting your industry. For the electrical reliability industry IEEE, EASA, and NEMA are examples of high profile industry standards that your electrical reliability team should be aware of.