Vibration Analysis of Rotating Plant Machinery

The Arnold Engineering Development Center has witnessed vibration anomalies on facility equipment that have raised concerns about possible catastrophic or costly failures. In response, AEDC is seeking an advanced, comprehensive condition monitoring system to provide accurate and timely health information; information that will allow AEDC to foresee and avoid unexpected, and possibly catastrophic and costly, failures. Sentient is proposing to develop and install such a system at AEDC, with cutting-edge signal processing, significant flexibility, and powerful yet intuitive data management and visualization software. Sentient will design the system for networked and route-based operation, and will demonstrate the system on three AEDC drivetrains. BENEFIT: The proposed condition monitoring system will provide maintainers, analysts, and operators with accurate, timely, and thus valuable health information for critical machinery. This information will allow maintainers, analysts, and operators to foresee and avoid unexpected, potentially catastrophic, and potentially costly failures. The proposed system will also help reduce routing maintenance costs by providing information that allows operators to optimize maintenance scheduling and maximize availability and performance. The aspects of the system that help reduce maintenance costs also help maximize safety. The number of potential commercial applications is huge. The technologies developed under this SBIR will be very general purpose, and thus applicable to a wide variety of machinery in a wide variety of industries. Target applications include critical machinery in the military, and critical machinery in the power generation, manufacturing, mining, marine, and aerospace industries, to name a few.