glenn1340
25-07-2014, 04:22 AM
I`m sure everyone here has been to a motor that had noisy bearings or had tripped due to the bearings collapsing. I`ve been to many but have never had to watch one actually fail.
The site I`m on has a boiler fed by a 110kw water feed pump at 44 bar. Due to cost cutting the standby pump has been out of service for over a year. A few weeks ago the remaing one failed with a drive end bearing overheating. Much panic ensued as we only have one boiler and the entire site shuts down when the bolier fails; the motor was taken off the other pump and fitted in place of the bearing failure one. Halfway into a twelve hour night shift I thought the motor NDE was starting to be noisy but I put this down to listening just a bit to hard. One hour later I knew there was a problem developing as the noise was definitely there. If we had another pump I`d have switched over but I was stuck with this one. Over the next three hours it became increasingly louder so by 4.30 am I was phoning people up to inform them of impending shutdown (we have to do this as a procedure) 4.45: smoke was filling the plant room and I saw in was coming from the NDE along with loud screeching. I shut down the pump along with the boiler. A new motor was fitted and the boiler on line again fifteen hours later. So much for cost cutting!
The reason for posting this is I often read that bearings usually fail over a period of months (I`ve asked for bearing monitoring but once agian "cost cutting" gets in the way) so it was quite an experience to be present during the rapid failure of a bearing.
The site I`m on has a boiler fed by a 110kw water feed pump at 44 bar. Due to cost cutting the standby pump has been out of service for over a year. A few weeks ago the remaing one failed with a drive end bearing overheating. Much panic ensued as we only have one boiler and the entire site shuts down when the bolier fails; the motor was taken off the other pump and fitted in place of the bearing failure one. Halfway into a twelve hour night shift I thought the motor NDE was starting to be noisy but I put this down to listening just a bit to hard. One hour later I knew there was a problem developing as the noise was definitely there. If we had another pump I`d have switched over but I was stuck with this one. Over the next three hours it became increasingly louder so by 4.30 am I was phoning people up to inform them of impending shutdown (we have to do this as a procedure) 4.45: smoke was filling the plant room and I saw in was coming from the NDE along with loud screeching. I shut down the pump along with the boiler. A new motor was fitted and the boiler on line again fifteen hours later. So much for cost cutting!
The reason for posting this is I often read that bearings usually fail over a period of months (I`ve asked for bearing monitoring but once agian "cost cutting" gets in the way) so it was quite an experience to be present during the rapid failure of a bearing.