Industrial Equipment
Operation, startup and types of failure of the most common equipment on the plant floor: pumps, compressors, motors, boilers and more.
9 articles
Boilers: energy savings and the maintenance plan, daily to annual
10 energy-saving measures for boilers and the maintenance tasks organized by their real frequency: daily, weekly, monthly and annual — what gets checked in each one, and why.
Burners and industrial furnaces: controlling combustion
The air purge before ignition, the flame detector that cuts the fuel, and the flue gas parameters that need watching — because in a burner, every efficiency checkpoint is also a safety checkpoint.
Centrifugal pumps: startup, key factors and types of failure
How to start and stop a centrifugal pump without damaging it, the four factors you always need to watch, and a way to classify its failures that helps diagnose them faster.
Compressors: lubrication, cooling and the preventive plan
Lubrication is the most important chapter in a compressor's life, and cooling decides a good part of its energy consumption. With the real preventive maintenance table for reciprocating compressors, by operating period.
Electric motors: efficiency rules, initial and major inspection
What the European efficiency regulation has required since 2015, the minimum insulation resistance values by power rating, and what gets checked at a motor's initial (500 h) and major (10,000 h) inspection.
Electrical substations: equipment to maintain and safety rules
What a substation is, the 19 systems that need maintaining, and the 5 golden rules for working on de-energized equipment — because in a substation, maintenance starts with safety, not the other way around.
Gas turbines: borescope inspection and acceptance criteria
How a gas turbine is inspected without opening the casing, the exact numerical limits that separate an acceptable defect from one that requires stopping the machine, and why its maintenance is almost always done by the manufacturer.
Natural gas engines: the hour-by-hour maintenance plan
From 50 to 48,000 hours of use: the staged preventive maintenance plan for a natural-gas reciprocating internal combustion engine, what gets checked at each stage, and the 6 systems where its typical failures originate.
Transformers: what degrades the insulation and how to inspect it
Moisture, oxygen, heat and external contamination are the four factors that degrade a transformer's insulation — with the table of which test to run on each component, from the windings to the radiators.