While standard, liquid-filled gauges are reliable, they have significant downsides that adversely impact a company's bottom line. Specifically, they can add to the time spent manually checking each gauge, while opening a company up to opportunities for equipment damage.
Let's face facts: walking from one end of a plant to the other while checking gauge after gauge along the way is a time-consuming endeavor. To ensure pressure levels are being tracked consistently, a company would have to employ several maintenance technicians to check the gauges repeatedly throughout the day, possibly several times per hour.
In the real world, gauges are manually checked only a few times daily by one or two people. A customer that produces specialty metal products had been checking pressure gauges on their hydraulic pumps once at the beginning and once at the end of each of the company's three shifts. This left long periods of time in which the levels weren't being monitored. Thus, sudden drops or spikes in the pressure went unnoticed, leading to disastrous effects, like overheating, equipment inefficiency, and eventual breakdown.
The customer purchased and installed SensoNODE™ Blue sensors on the hydraulic pumps and installed SCOUT™ Mobile software on their workers' mobile phones. The system lets them track the pressure levels throughout the day, allowing them to trend the data that had previously been lost.
By setting user-defined alerts, workers are notified of sudden fluctuations that had typically gone unnoticed. This allows workers to address issues before they escalate and cause any serious damage.
Monitoring is also simpler and more frequent. Workers can also download the readings and email the information to the next shift, making it easier to share more accurate information.
Because the customer produces high-grade metals, an hour of downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Being able to track and trend condition levels helps the customer keep things running to minimize unplanned downtime, saving them money in the long run. They are already considering installing SensoNODE sensors on their pneumatic equipment.
Parker designs its solutions to work across multiple industries. So be sure to visit our condition monitoring website for more on how use SensoNODE sensors and SCOUT software as a diagnostic solution for your hydraulic pump systems.