MACHINERY CONDITION MONITORING PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES

While teaching the subject of machinery fault diagnostics and signal processing, and conducting short courses for industry professionals for more than fifteen years to the senior year and graduate students at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, I have always had a problem locating a single book on the subject.

Though there are excellent research journals and trade magazines on the subject, I have failed to locate a book without bias toward the equipment used or process followed for detecting faults in machines in general, and rotating machines in particular.

With this preamble I began to write this book, drawing on my experience with machinery condition monitoring while consulting for many industries in India and abroad over the last two decades. In many of my fault-detection exercises in the industries where I have consulted, I have come across technicians and engineers who wonder what fast Fourier transform (FFT) is, and I have been provided with a table full of numbers and asked to find the fault in the machines.

Many engineers in the field learn this subject from the technical brochure of the equipment they use, without understanding their limitations. They feel that since they have a piece of costly equipment at their disposal, they can detect and diagnose the fault in any machine. One of the purposes of this book is to eliminate such myths. No offense intended...