by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Mar 20, 2022 | Asset Management, The Sustainable Plant
These days, there is ample hype, not to mention plenty of articles, on digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). So much that even those of us in the midst of such discussions tend to get confused. The terms and their...
by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Mar 6, 2022 | Asset Management, Electrical Reliability
As maintenance and reliability professionals, we know that the life of bearings and other components will be reduced through misalignment. Still, there’s a question: What is the impact associated with misalignment, meeting basic alignment tolerances, and...
by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Feb 27, 2022 | Electrical Reliability, The Sustainable Plant
Electricity: Other than work performed through connected equipment, it’s invisible and rarely considered until a blackout or other dramatic event occurs. From a reliability perspective, more effort is spent on understanding the greasing of a bearing that would...
by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Feb 19, 2022 | Asset Management, Electrical Reliability, The Sustainable Plant
Take it or leave it, the discussion of greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions has been relatively dominant in energy industry circles since the early 1990s. These days, industrial operations look to projects that will reduce energy (which directly impacts the bottom line) and...
by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Feb 13, 2022 | Asset Management, Electrical Reliability
During the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Energy (USDOE, energy.gov) and industry partners developed additional methods for load and efficiency testing that could be easily performed in the field with standard electrical instruments. While they may not be as exact as...
by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Feb 7, 2022 | Asset Management, Electrical Reliability
In 2010, an independent study was conducted at Dreisilker Electric Motors (Glen Ellyn, IL) to compare field-efficiency-testing methods to laboratory methods. Investigators used the U.S. Department of Energy (USDOE) MotorMaster Plus 4.0 (MMPlus) and a commercial ESA...
by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Jan 30, 2022 | Asset Management, Electrical Reliability
One of the more interesting issues with which we’ve been wrestling since the early 1990s is how to evaluate the efficiency of an electric motor in the field. Sounds simple, but even now, the discussion continues among academia, manufacturers, end-users,...
by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Jan 23, 2022 | Asset Management, Electrical Reliability
As with most industries, electric-motor repair has good and bad actors. I remember part of my training with Dreisilker Electric back in the early 1990s. If we lost a repair job to a lower-cost service company, we would take a current reading at a specific load and...
by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Jan 15, 2022 | Asset Management, The Sustainable Plant
The success of reliability and maintenance (R&M) programs ebb and flow depending on the flavor of the month. Frequently those programs gain legs because of some catastrophic incident. Or, perhaps, they are used as a way to reduce headcount based on common business...
by Howard Penrose, Ph.D., CMRP | Jan 10, 2022 | Asset Management, Electrical Reliability
In most of my articles, the terms Electrical Signature Analysis (ESA) and Motor Current Signature Analysis (MCSA) have been interchangeable. There are, however, differences in how the in-depth analysis of both voltage and current views the system versus just the...
