Unreliable gearboxes can have an amazing ability to ruin your day. They are often small, often overlooked and often critical to operation of that conveyor belt, agitator, loading gantry........

Small Gearboxes - It would be tempting to say that oil analysis will solve all your problems. It wont and that is especially true of all those thousands of small gearboxes scattered around the plant but too small to feature in a full blown CM plan. Our advice in those instances is to use Acoustic Emissions as the appropriate technique, this will indicate issues such as poor lubrication before damage occurs. It requires only basic installation, can handle slow or stop start operation and does not need high level data processing.
Medium Size Gearboxes are really the most problematic. Often too small for a full oil analysis programme but also in critical and difficult to reach applications such as the Top Drive on an on-shore oil Drill Rig. No top drive - no drilling - and they do not carry spares.

What such installations do not like is stop start operation, shock loads, vibration when idle .... anything that disrupts a well formed oil film. Vibration monitoring is insensitive in this application as there are too many variables. Off-Site oil analysis is often difficult due to location or sampling issues. On-Site; again difficult unless maintenance staff willingly buy-in to the project. This is where On-Line comes in to its own.

Did you know - the Kittiwake On-Line metallic particle sensor is the only one on the market that is ATEX approved and suitable for use in Zone 1 - critical drive applications?

Atex-approved metallic particle sensor

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