P.A.&B.'s customers range from multi-nationals to small production businesses, engineering and electrical works who manufacture components or refurbish rotary plant such as pumps, electrical motors, hi-speed woodturning tooling, machined parts and fans etc. As part of the"service supply chain" the end customer can be in areas as diverse as chemicals to cathedrals, quarrying to hotels, and defence to DIY. It can be surprising where vibration is causing problems.
Depending on the customers problem the work involved may be at the customers premises where, for example, fans or some types of rolls require balancing in-situ or drive alignments may need accurately setting using laser alignment equipment. On occasion both dynamic balancing and laser alignment may be needed to sort out the problem on-site. eg fans driven by a motor via a coupling. Is the fan out of balance? Is the drive mis-aligned? Or both?
We have all seen the damage unwanted vibration in rotating machinery can cause, including bearing failure & internal & structural damage.
Unplanned downtime for repairs can slow down or worse still stop production.
This puts pressure on maintenance to fix-it as quickly as possible, often not to the standard they can work to nor in many instances has the cause of the vibration been removed.
The result is that production may be back on line but for only a limited time until the failure repeats itself. The costs for continual repairs and lost production are mounting.
Vibration is also the source of a lot of excessive noise. Fans, in particular, give problems. From those that are so bad they can be heard "half-a-mile-away", vibrating the ground and surrounding structure and causing control instrumentation to fail. To fans with only a small degree of imbalance which, though technically at an acceptable standard, can still give "nuisance" problems of background noise or as in a particular case of a cathedral organ fan also apparently affected the quality of the music !
Another direct consequence of imbalance can be the surface quality of a finished product. Ask any number of businesses manufacturing such items as wood-spindles & table-legs (by the 1,000's) or drive-belts (by the 1,000's) and the surface finish is paramount........"patter" marks consign the production run to the reject skip!
