PC-based diagnostic tool for predictive maintenance of equipment in the petroleum and chemical industries

The authors describe a PC-based monitoring system developed for the monitoring of motor drives used in the petroleum and chemical industries. The monitor uses a versatile front-end data acquisition system that can interface to a variety of transducers. It is used to provide information about the condition of motors and other equipment. Information gathered by the signal conditioning and event monitoring system will provide a database of problem trends which are very valuable to the design engineering teams in developing better and more cost-effective machines and systems. The authors describe the hardware and the software used in the monitor and illustrate several of its applications