Port Crane Gearbox Wear
Vibration data collected from cranes at a port revealed gearbox wear and damage, highlighting the importance of trend data over spot checks. A temporary Acoem MV-x monitoring system was installed to closely monitor the defect and demonstrate the benefits of continuous monitoring for critical assets.
Over the past few months, we’ve been collecting vibration data across 78 cranes at a port, focusing specifically on Automated Stacking Crane gearboxes. These are critical to the ports operation to keep containers moving.
We were able to make a few recommendations from oil changes to one gearbox that needed to be replaced due to damage on one the gears.
However, we were recently called back after engineers inspected one of the gearboxes we had previously assessed as being in good condition from the previous month. During their inspection, they discovered signs of wear in the gearbox and detected wear particles in the oil.
This Sunday, Thomas Baker went down to support the customer and collect new measurments which showed that within 3 months we were now seeing gear damage on the input pinion.
This customer is on there on CBM journey and has reinforced two things:
1. Spot checks aren't enough machine condition can change fast.
2. Trend data is very important it's not just about today's reading, it's about the story over time.
We’ve now installed a temporary Acoem MV-x monitoring system on this critical asset. This includes a tachometer that triggers the measurment when the crane meets the correct speed. This is marked as a Normal Operating condition, we can now begin to closley monitor the defect for any further detieration and it gives them the opportunity to see what continous monitoring could offer.
For critical machines and in paticular those that have unusual operation such as cranes continous monitoring systems such as the MV-x can be very usueful.
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