Current and voltage monitoring in electrical assets

Why is it important to monitor the current and voltage of electrical assets? Current and voltage monitoring of industrial electrical equipment such as motors, transformers, generators, batteries, photovoltaic plants, wind turbines, among others, is indispensable for ensuring the proper functioning of these assets and helping to maintain a more efficient production flow, bringing greater reliability to the plant. 

By using current and voltage monitoring devices to track the machinery’s health indices, it is possible to identify failures at an early stage, plan maintenance actions and see opportunities for improvement. Based on these analyses, it is also possible to drastically reduce the costs of repairing or replacing electric motors, reduce the MTBF (mean time between failures) index of the industrial plant’s electrical assets and increase machinery availability.

What is electric current and voltage monitoring?

Electric current and voltage monitoring makes it possible to monitor and analyze power, voltage and current information to make a detailed diagnosis of the state of the asset.

This monitoring, when carried out regularly, also allows the maintenance manager to identify areas for improvement, since this data reveals leakage current, instabilities, distortions and electrical surges. It is based on this information that planning is carried out to guarantee the assets’ energy efficiency. 

Performing predictive maintenance on electrical equipment by analyzing and monitoring current and voltage is essential, as problems with these types of machines can mean permanent damage to their functioning, which means that they must be replaced, incurring very high costs. In addition, there’s a risk of subjecting entire systems to dangerous overloads that could lead to serious problems in the entire production flow in the long term.

How is current and voltage monitored?

By combining software and hardware, such as sensors, it is possible to obtain a visualization of the health and performance of the electricity consumption of assets by cross-referencing data. This data collected by energy sensing is sent to the cloud via the gateway, processed, stored and transformed into a complete and assertive prognosis. In the case of Dynamox Enging, these diagnoses are generated automatically, indicating failures assertively.

By taking these measurements frequently, the predictive maintenance professional is able to collect essential data on the behavior of the asset and identify what corrections are needed before a failure can interrupt the use of the equipment. This is so because current and voltage monitoring is capable of pointing out voltage and current unbalance, oscillations in installations, waveform distortions, electrical voltage surges, among other failure factors. 

Benefits of monitoring current and voltage in electrical assets:

Discovering opportunities for improvement

Monitoring the current and voltage data of this type of equipment and tracking its performance provides insights into which points can be worked on so that there is constant optimization of the asset plant and production flow. 

Directing attention to maintenance activities

The information mapped by current and voltage monitoring should be used to guide maintenance activities and create routines for inspecting electrical machinery. This process is very important if abrupt shutdowns, failures, overloads or permanent damage are to be avoided. 

The importance of combining different predictive maintenance techniques – understanding motor failures

When it comes to motors, an asset present in all industry segments, there are various techniques which, combined, help to identify a wide range of potential failures. Currently, predictive maintenance techniques using vibration and temperature monitoring succeed in identifying failure modes in approximately 55% of cases. When combined with current and voltage analysis, provided by a high-quality partner such as Dynamox Enging, we are able to cover another 45%, meaning that almost all types of failures can be detected beforehand. We can clearly see this relationship between the types of analysis in the diagram below, when looking at the motor as part of a chain of events, as well as when analyzing the main causes of failures:

To illustrate the complementarity of solutions with vibration and temperature monitoring techniques (Dynamox) and current and voltage monitoring (Dynamox Enging), the image below shows the most common failure modes identified by sensors and devices. Getting the best technologies from the same partner can make the whole process much more efficient.

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