Engine vibration Monitoring: by Daniel Fahy.
In today's world people are always looking to improve things such as engines, this can benefit engine owners and give them a more reliable engine that can be put through it's paces. A good way in improving engines is to monitor it's actions. Today I am going to talk about ways to monitor the engines vibrations.
There are two main types of monitoring they are stationary monitoring which measures input and response output to give more precise results,.
and monitoring when the engine is in operation, this usually measures just response.
The first type of monitoring is Stationary monitoring, it has three main parts they are excitation mechanism, The transduction system and The analysing system.
The excitation mechanism vibrates the engine, the transduction system measures the response of the vibrations and the analysing system measure the signals from the transducers.
Monitoring when the engine is in operation uses the same technique to analyse the vibration, the only difference is that instead of the excitation mechanism producing the vibration, we measure the engine vibration that it produces when running. .
The results we get from this technique are also sent to the avionics system, so that the pilot can monitor how the engines are running. .
The monitoring system measures the vibration signal by taking signals from the sensor then sends it to an electronic unit, this electronic unit converts the vibration velocity to an equivalent voltage value. .
A required frequency range is then selected by a filter and the effective value is then detected by the analyser.
The benefits of engine monitoring are:.
1) Improved operations.
2) To ensure that as much life as possible is extracted from life limited parts, hence reducing costs.
3) Improved safety for reliability .
4) To provide information for next generation engine design.
This is because, if the right counter- measures and safety precautions are not in place the highly stressed components in modern engines can fail in service and terrible problems can occur.
