Using Ultrasound for Condition Monitoring

In the past decade, the capabilities of many condition-based assessment tools, sometimes called predictive technologies, have significantly expanded. The hardware has become more compact, more rugged and much easier to use. The companion software applications have become more powerful with exponentially increasing capabilities. Additionally, the software tools have become more mainstream with much less reliance on proprietary protocol and programming. This situation has led to expanded use of these sophisticated tools to monitor and assess equipment health. We have seen vibration analysis, oil analysis, infrared, motor circuit analysis and many other non-destructive tools become very popular. Many organizations now stress their use as a prominent part of the maintenance and reliability programs.
As Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) theory points out, it is important for an organization to use multiple predictive technologies in a program. The type and how much of each predictive technology used directly depends on what the organization’s critical equipment is, how this critical equipment fails, what the failure consequences are, and finally what technologies will proactively detect this defect early before catastrophic failure occurs.
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