Condition Monitoring Of Small Machines Using Piezo Transducers
Abstract
The condition monitoring of a machine is carried out by measuring its vibration characteristics using an accelerometer. The placement of an accelerometer on a machine could cause a mass loading effect, which is able to influence the machine's vibration characteristics. The mass loading effect is negligible when the accelerometer's mass is lesser then 1/10 of the weight of the machine. Thus, for small machines, the mass loading effect becomes significant. Therefore, this research proposes to measure the vibration characteristics of a small machine using a piezo transducer instead of an accelerometer. A small rotor system was constructed by imposing few errors and LABVIEW was used as the signal processing software to identify them. From the processed data, the results show an error lesser than 10% for misalignment and warped rotor. Thus, showing that the piezo transducer can replace the accelerometer for small machines