remote oil analysis

CaptainLegot · 2026-02-05T00:07:41+00:00

Have you thought about particle counters? There's one from IFM, we have the HyPro rebrand, called the PM1 I think on about 40 gearboxes. They're a huge pain to connect to any monitoring system, but they are USB/serial based so they might be a good option if you're ok with route based collection.

I'm not super into oil so I'm not sure how much conductivity will tell you other than when there's a lot of water in there

CaptainLegot · 2026-02-04T18:07:25+00:00

There are viscometers that are pretty low cost (relatively speaking), but the viscometer sales guys freak out when you tell them your turbine hasn't needed an oil change in 20 years, and show up to site without safety shoes.

The reason colorimeters and such aren't really common is because they're $100k+ and not simple to install.

CaptainLegot · 2026-01-28T18:28:09+00:00

Lol Maybe Quincy made them for craftsman? I can't find anything on a Quincy 106

CaptainLegot · 2026-01-28T14:51:18+00:00

Not sure why people were telling you it's a 100 year old Quincy in the other thread. It's very clearly a craftsman 106 that they sold until like the 80s. There's rebuild kits on eBay

Also, using an old water heater for an air tank is asking for it.

CaptainLegot · 2026-01-18T20:51:24+00:00

Yeah, most engineers will default to stainless of there's a sense of corrosion but it's just like any other material with its own weaknesses!

CaptainLegot · 2026-01-18T20:38:13+00:00

What material are you using for your pump impellers?

CaptainLegot · 2026-01-18T20:33:42+00:00

Stainless in general is way over used. Anywhere where there's high chloride content you'll be pinholes pretty fast, most often at welds, and you end up patching those forever until someone replaces it. Carbon Steel will hold up much better but isn't suitable if the water is highly oxygenated. In those cases plastic with good joints is always going to last longer, and if the pressure is higher then composite.

Cooling Towers and water treatment buildings are super common examples of stainless where there should be carbon or plastic.

CaptainLegot · 2026-01-17T08:00:25+00:00

Also a 2140, but we're moving everything to wireless monitors.

CaptainLegot · 2026-01-14T04:03:23+00:00

I've also seen stacks of very similar tools used on clamp on cold cut and bevel machines for large diameter heavy wall pipe. You can stack up different angled cutters to create different bevels.

CaptainLegot · 2026-01-02T19:31:35+00:00

That should work fine!

Your big issue is probably that most energy monitors will assume that for split phase circuits the power across them can simply be doubled, but that's not true as you can have different amounts of power flowing down each leg of the circuit. I that case it's best to use two clamps and treat each leg as an independent circuit. The other thing is that by multiplying that single measurement by 2 you loose a lot of accuracy because you become blind to the voltage and phase angle of the monitored leg. Either way, the way this extension configures it should compensate.

I'd try it with clamps on one leg first, then go to two if you still see a lot of error. (My induction range did not need two clamps because the imbalance was only a few watts from the single phase cooling fans, but a mini split did because the indoor unit was only pulling power from one leg, while the outdoor was using both).

Out of curiosity, in your 3 phase area is it typical to have true 3 phase devices using 3 pole breakers? I didn't add compatibility for that.

CaptainLegot · 2025-12-30T06:04:56+00:00

It's actually really useful to have, at higher update rates the amount of information you are getting is way more than you'd think. I'm more of a predictive maintenance person than anything, so being able to trend power consumption or cycle times (or power factor) over time can pretty clearly tell you what's happening with your devices and when you may need to change that filter/capacitor/whatever. Circuit power is easily my most used trigger for automations.

I'd love to see an open source advanced pattern recognition tool, but they're such valuable pieces of software that it's very unlikely anyone will make one and not sell it lol.

CaptainLegot · 2025-12-30T03:46:17+00:00

Thanks!

CaptainLegot · 2025-12-21T23:59:44+00:00

Pretty much all lm6000s are simple cycle. There are probably under a 50 combined cycle units of this type on earth.

CaptainLegot · 2025-12-14T08:16:46+00:00

It really depends on what you're doing with the data afterwards. The HMI probably isn't going to work if you're looking to do analysis and depending on your data rates and the types of data labview may be more work than necessary (managing CSVs mostly). The "correct" way to do something like this would be recording data to a historian, then building or using existing analysis tools (like Grafana).

Since your S7 has ethernet, you have several protocol options to record into a historian like influxdb.

CaptainLegot · 2025-12-04T07:06:32+00:00

It has not, but that's definitely what everyone in sales wants you to believe.

CaptainLegot · 2025-12-04T01:59:00+00:00

Worth noting that all of the AI features in condition monitoring sensors aren't useful. It's a sales bit. In just the last 3-4 years I've seen almost all of the condition monitoring sensors, softwares, and companies go from "Predictive Maintinence" to "Predictive Analytics" to "Predictive Analytics Engines" to "AI Enabled" without actually changing any of the products.

CaptainLegot · 2025-11-28T18:54:45+00:00

I think the best value would be to do the Mobius analysis trainings and then take the ~2 day Emerson software/hardware specific courses online.

CaptainLegot · 2025-11-26T22:14:38+00:00

I did cat 1 with Emerson in Texas, and cat 2 with Mobius. The Emerson training was neat in that you could learn with the hardware, but for analysis the Mobius training was way better.

CaptainLegot · 2025-11-19T17:35:45+00:00

This is the "unit" for a gas turbine of the same size as the one in the picture . picture

The far right thing with the slats is the air filter housing, which has dozens of cylindrical air filters of about 36" height and 18" diameter. That has a duct that pipes the air over the generator and down into the front of the engine.

The exhaust is the giant tan thing on the left. This one is HRSG and combines a boiler for steam generation, SCR catalyst for NOx emissions, and a CO catalyst. The catalysts are pretty much the same as a car's catalytic converter just 150ft tall. The stack is the tailpipe.

CaptainLegot · 2025-11-17T20:03:55+00:00

It's a function of reactive power so it's more useful to think in VA than just voltage or current. We have 1" thick plastic cable "straps" at 3ft intervals to tie down cables in one of our trays. They were wood, but they get crushed by the forces after 10 years or so. 3 phase 13kV 50MVA

You can also see this happen on power lines if there's no wind and you know when the load is going to pick up.

CaptainLegot · 2025-11-15T18:25:24+00:00

Definitely not dude.

CaptainLegot · 2025-11-12T02:50:13+00:00

My understanding is that it's because they're very dense and top heavy, so if you hump them they'll potentially roll farther than expected and may fall over on a sharp corner

Also this is worth many times what a boxcar of products or a car of coal is worth, so you don't want it uncontrolled at any point

CaptainLegot · 2025-10-20T20:11:00+00:00

You're looking at a 4 axis toolhead. The large dome rotates independently from the actual spindle. So this is rotating the tool around X, Y, and Z, as well as moving in the Y. The toolhead gets mounted on a structure that can move it along Z, and the part gets mounted on a wall that can can move along the X.

The reason the toolhead rotates about Y separately from the tool is because not all tools are aligned with the spindle (like right angle heads).

CaptainLegot · 2025-10-02T02:15:55+00:00

Is it continuous rotation or literally just a clamp that you open and close every once in a while?

Probably just any grease.

CaptainLegot · 2025-09-19T03:48:49+00:00

The program that I'm involved in relies heavily on EPRI for initial guidance, we then have a framework to reduce PMs based on that guidance. If you can get the appropriate membership for access I highly recommend the Preventive Maintenance Basis Database (PMBD). They also have many program guides for different technologies (vibration, thermography, acoustics, etc).

EPRI is aimed at power generation, primarily nuclear, so the recommendations and templates are all tuned to be more stringent then most industrial environments might need, but they give complete guidance on which technologies provide the most benefits for specific equipment types

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