When engineers at Peter Brotherhood were faced with the task of adding 24/7 condition monitoring to another manufacturer's reciprocating gas compressor they decided to incorporate vibration-monitoring accelerometers from Variohm-Eurosensor. They are part of a complete condition monitoring system on the compressor, which is used for compressing natural gas.
Because of the potentially explosive environment in which the compressor is used, Wilcoxon models 786-IS and 786T-IS were chose, both of which are ATEX approved units with a dynamic output biased at 12Vdc.
Vibration monitoring is a useful diagnostic tool when used in preventative maintenance programmes. In this particular application they are used to measure the vibration and temperature of the suction/delivery valves as well as the vibration generated by the crankshaft and drive motor.
This vibration would normally be a settled, regular and predicable pattern. If the measured output changes, this generally means that some form of adjustment or maintenance is required.