LabVIEW is a well known software. However, lately I have been getting enquiries from customers who are interested to ditch LabVIEW.
Naturally, I was curious since customers can use their LabVIEW with our DAQ.
The reply is simply convenience and cost.
If you are looking for a lower cost alternative to LabVIEW for your test and measurement, or condition monitoring requirements get in touch with us.
Customers are increasingly turning to the use of wireless vibration sensors to monitor their entire plant's critical machines.
The benefits associated with the use of wireless vibration sensors are attractive :-
- Low cost of wireless vibration sensors
- No costly and troublesome cable laying
- Data accessibility 24/7
- Use of AI to analyze the data
- Easier to scale the monitoring
Companies that offer wireless vibration sensors will no doubt tout the benefits rather than the negatives. So how does the use of wireless vibration sensors really hold up in actual application?
No plant users like to tell you about the negatives since it reflects badly on their decision making. Some may think it is not professional to criticize.
At IMS Systems we believe that users should understand what they are getting before they plunk down their money because once a system is installed they have to live with it. So here's some information we heard from users from past interaction.
User-1
User-1 proposed to monitor their motors once every hour. They went for a brand supplied by the motor manufacturer.
After a few years passed, I happened to see the sensor on one of their motors during a plant visit. The engineer who put together the bid for the condition monitoring program had already left the company.
I asked the current engineer how the condition monitoring program was getting on. He said that they were going to scrap it.
I was curious to know why so I asked for the reason. The engineer said that the data storage charges were getting to be too expensive for them to continue.
User-2
User-2 is an unusual case in that they have their own brand of wireless vibration sensor complete with cloud monitoring.
User-2 did not explain why they have scrapped their wireless vibration monitoring system. However, they were going to replace it with wired vibration sensor.
User-3
This user had bought wired vibration sensors from us. I went to their plant as they needed some assistance with the installation.
At the plant I could see wireless vibration sensors installed on the motors. The brand of the wireless vibration sensors were from the motor manufacturer.
As User-3 was a vendor they did not know about the wireless vibration sensor but I could not help but wonder whether the reason for not using the wireless vibration sensor was the same as for User-1 since the brand used by User-3 was the same as used by User-1.
User-4
This user was testing our monitoring system for deployment with their software.
He said that their monthly data storage cost $16K. The use of our monitoring device will shave this cost easily by 50% or more.
User-5
I happened to meet this customer at an exhibition. He said he was pulling out all his existing cables because they had deteriorated in a shorter time frame than anticipated.
This would be a very expensive exercise to take out the existing cables and lay new ones. This time he would be replacing the cables with a brand that is more expensive but lasting longer.
Nowadays, one of the most common reason I hear for not using wired vibration sensor is the cost of laying the cable. I am not surprised. If I am the user I would have the same concern.
There are definitely pros and cons whichever approach you follow. What you would want to consider are not just the short term factors but also long term impact.
I happened to see an article on search optimization and the questions raised could well apply to the choice of vibration sensors.
In the article, the author wrote that a routine decision to buy a low cost toothbrush costing $5 would be done within 5 minutes. By comparison, if the user was considering a $150 toothbrush he would spend days researching before making a decision.
The author stated that when the stakes rise, perceived risk multiples across five areas namely performance, financial, psychological, time and social. The user would consider the following areas of concern :-
Performance Risk - will it work?
Financial Risk - can I afford the mistake?
Psychological Risk - will I regret this?
Time Risk - how long will it take to fix this if I'm wrong
Social Risk - what will others think?
In the example of the toothbrush, the author wrote that the five perceptions would push us to invest disproportionate effort to avoid even small probabilities of major losses.
When applied to condition monitoring this means that a potential customer of condition monitoring solution would look for as many alternatives as they can. They will also ask for information, review the information before deciding on what they want in order to reduce their risk with ending up with a system that ends up with them spending more money down the line or giving them unexpected technical problems.
If we apply the five perceptions to vibration monitoring condition they would look something like below. Since the use of wired vibration sensors have been around for a long time I would examine wireless vibration sensors instead.
Performance Risk - will it work?
Certainly, wireless vibration sensors will work. The question is how well will it work. In tenders for wired vibration sensor I have never seen a clause on uptime availability but for wireless vibration sensor this is an important requirement. One major contributing factor for wireless vibration sensor downtime is battery life. This depends on the frequency of monitoring, battery type, battery size and environmental factors.
Financial Risk - can I afford the mistake?
I guess this depends. If you are monitoring a few assets then a mistake can be written off more easily as compared to when you are monitoring a hundred assets. In this respect the cost involved would be the cost of surveying a site to identify locations to place routers, cost of installation, the cost of sensors, routers, possibly Edge PCs, cellular data costs, storage costs, maintenance cost to upgrade firmware, complying to best cybersecurity practices, keeping spares and so on.
Psychological Risk - will I regret this?
Since the decision is never made by one person and always made after careful consideration the person-in-charge might not regret it but it would not look good on his resume if the condition monitoring system ended up costing a lot of money to run and maintain, and in the end has to be scrapped.
Time Risk - how long will it take to fix this if I'm wrong
As the customer you can always try to mitigate any downtime by putting in clauses into your tender requirements. However, if it is a system issue then the problem may likely persist. This is more so if the issue is due to a firmware upgrade.
Social Risk - what will others think?
The only cause of concern would be what would your boss think should the condition monitoring program goes sideways especially since you are the one that championed for it. I know of a customer that decided to create their own monitoring software.
Later the engineer who wrote the program left the company. The replacement engineer who was given training by the creator engineer was unable to handle the software and the program went into disarray and the replacement engineer tried to reprogram the monitoring using a different software.
The use of wireless vibration sensors is very attractive. More and more manufacturers and bandwagons are jumping onto the bandwagon to offer their solutions. At some point a shake up will happen. I can't help but wonder what will happen to the condition monitoring of those customers that are using a company that suddenly decides to shut down their business (or condition monitoring business unit as in the case of User-2; a 2021 blog post on the benefits of this company's offering is still on the internet).
A senior consultant working for a manufacturer selling wireless vibration sensor and a whole range of instrumentation with a global presence told me that he thought that wireless vibration sensor is a fad. I don't think so.
There is a place and time for wireless vibration sensor. What a user could do is to weigh the short term versus the long term benefits of using it, what they can live with or without, how much disruption they can tolerate. A simpler system of monitoring has less points of failure, making it more reliable and less likely to fail or have more operating issues. Sometimes keeping it straightforward and simple is good timeless advice.
If you would like to explore the use of wireless vibration sensor :-
a) Consider monitoring a smaller number of assets initially so that you can assess the short versus long term impact before investing heavily in it.
b) Monitor critical assets as well as balance-of-plant assets at the same time to give you a better idea of how well the use of wireless vibration sensors will turn out from the perspective of operation uptime, technical, cybersecurity and financial.
c) Assess what information you really must have versus information that is good to have but not necessary. The more frequent data is collected, the shorter the battery life. This means battery replacement need to be carried out more often. This is an impact on the cost of manpower and replacement batteries, not to mention disruption to monitoring. Also, the more data you collect and send out the higher the cellular bill unless you use plant Wi-fi (this can give rise to IT issues). More data means more cloud storage is required.... I think you get the picture. So test to see what you can live with.
I left out sensor design to keep the information easier to digest but yes, sensor design can affect the accuracy of data. However, the above should be sufficient to help you with your decision to use wireless vibration sensor.
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