Oil Condition Monitoring of Large Rotating Machinery, Trends and Future
The market of condition monitoring of large machinery is growing at a CAGR of 7.1%. The main factors behind the growth of this market are the increase in remote control due to the influence of Covid-19, the spread of predictive maintenance of industrial machinery, and the introduction of automatic condition monitoring technology in smart factories. Under the circumstances of Covid-19, the introduction of remote monitoring of production equipment has made it clear that companies can continue their activities even during lockdown, and machine condition monitoring will become an increasingly important technology in the future.
Machines that use lubricants are increasingly using oil sensors for remote monitoring. What can be found by monitoring the oil sensor is a wide range of things such as wear of parts, mixing of water and different kinds of oil, increase in viscosity, depletion of additives, etc., and it is possible to diagnose the health of the machine and the remaining life of the oil. Oil sensors include sensors that measure physical properties such as viscosity, dielectric constant, conductivity, and color, particle counters that measure the size and number of fine particles such as wear debris, iron sensors that measure the concentration of iron powder, and moisture sensors. They can be used singly or in combination. For example, in the gearboxes of large wind turbines and offshore wind turbines, an oil property sensor, a particle counter, and an iron powder sensor are used together. The effects of introducing oil sensors include the progress of decarbonization by reducing the amount of oil used, that is, the reduction of CO2 emissions, the reduction of the Life Cycle Cost (LCC) of the machinery, the improvement of operating rates, and the maintenance of social infrastructure. In this presentation, we will introduce the trends and future of oil condition monitoring technology for large machines. Recent technological trends will be introduced.
