Planetary Gearboxes drive some of your most critical assets, so how are you monitoring them?

Monitoring planetary gearboxes is an important part of any asset health program, whether they are driving HPGR units, Reclaimers, Mills, Rolls in a steel plant or paper mill or even in HME applications.

It is notoriously difficult to monitor and identify issues with these assets at an early stage. They are typically monitored periodically using a portable data collector, which only provides information once a month at best. What if we could utilise an online monitoring system designed with complex gearboxes in mind to give us clear and actionable information about the health of your gearbox?

The Orbit DCM is the latest online vibration monitoring device from Bently Nevada, providing 16 channels of simultaneous vibration or other inputs, such as temperature, dynamic pressure or radial vibration (proximity probes). With the ability to capture data up to 12,800 spectral lines, high-resolution data capture of up to 50ms resolution in Transient Data capture mode and Modbus input and output for connection to your DCS, the Orbit DCM is perfect for capturing all the data you need.

By connecting to accelerometers strategically located around the asset, and utilising various inputs, including speed (from a keyphasor or magnetic pickup), load or flow (from DCS), we can collect highly reliable and repeatable data, through state based collection.

This data can then be viewed and analysed through Bently Nevada’s System 1 software platform to give you a clear view of the asset’s health. Bently Nevada even has a patented measurement called Sideband Energy Ratio (SER), designed for complex gearboxes, that helps to identify when you should make a call on bad gears.

If you would like to know more or see a demo of the Orbit DCM in action, please get in touch with us.

Author: Jordan Robb - NVMS Business Unit Leader, Asset Health

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