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Full-scale vibration condition monitoring on a smartphone

Have you ever been lying on the beach and begun to wonder about the state of your LP turbines? Or maybe you’ve been out on business and anxious to know if that troublesome exciter bearing has settled down? Many people will be familiar with using their phone as a camera, music player, web browser, email client, calculator or even a navigation device, but not many will have anticipated using it for full scale vibration condition monitoring.

One of the many advantages of Prosig’s PROTOR Vibration Condition Monitoring System is it’s adherence to open standards and protocols. This means that it can easily take advantage of new technologies as they appear. Recently, Prosig undertook a study to examine the feasibility of using an Android based smartphone to remotely access one of its PROTOR systems monitoring a power station.

All PROTOR servers are configured to support VNC (Virtual Network Computing) access so connections can be made via any VNC client. By installing one of the free client apps available for Android it was a simple task to connect to the PROTOR server. This allows an engineer to access the full range of PROTOR diagnostic screens and access runup & rundown plots, mimic diagrams, trend plots, waterfall plots and all the other realtime and historic information available from the PROTOR system. Although an Android-based phone was used for this evaluation, similar VNC apps exist for the iPhone and other smartphones.

The monitoring and diagnosis of rotating equipment based on vibration analysis measurement is at the core of predictive maintenance systems. This type of system allows the condition and health of machines to be assessed. The PROTOR Vibration Monitoring System, designed and manufactured by PROSIG, provides reliable on-line monitoring of turbine generators, main boiler feed pumps and other auxiliary plant equipment. It provides both real-time and long-term historical access to the important vibration factors together with various plant process parameters which indicate the machine state.