A Combined Preventive Maintenance Strategy for Bearings to Accomplish the Failure Prevention of Rotating Equipment

This study presents a combined preventive maintenance strategy for bearings to accomplish the failure prevention of rotating equipment. The concepts of preventive maintenance and trend chart are introduced in the beginning. Next, as an illustration, this strategy installs four accelerometers at selected locations of the equipment to acquire vibration amplitude data periodically. Only if any one of amplitudes exceeds the corresponding prescribed warning value, the acquired time-domain signal then is sent to the vibration analyzer to establish the corresponding frequency spectrum by the Fast Fourier Transform method. Contrasting the frequency of the highest amplitude among the amplitudes of harmonic frequencies in the spectrum with the calculated defect frequencies of the bearings, the defective bearing can be accurately located. Consequently, the abnormality of the defective bearing is early detected such that failure of the rotating equipment is prevented by executing preventive maintenance. At the end, the defective bearing is taken out from the monitored equipment to verify this investigation. The reliability improvement of rotating equipment is illustrated as well. This study was performed in a real workshop.