Archives for July 2019

Get your bearings: Electric motor lubrication 101

How often should electric motors be lubricated? How can you be sure you’re using the right amount? Here’s your primer.

By Thomas Bishop, EASA

Jun 19, 2019

How often your facility’s electric motors should be lubricated—and how much lubricant they should receive—depends on several factors. When you’re considering electric motor lubrication frequency and quantity, take into account the following:

Is the lubricant grease or oil?
Is the bearing type sleeve, ball, or roller?
If it is a ball bearing, is the enclosure open, shielded, or sealed?

Let’s delve into these considerations further by breaking them down into the following categories:

Grease lubrication frequency and quantity for ball and roller (rolling element) bearings.
Oil lubrication frequency and level (relates to quantity) for ball and roller bearings.
Oil lubrication frequency and level (relates to quantity) for sleeve bearings.

Grease lubrication of sleeve bearings is extremely rare, and sealed bearings cannot be relubricated, so those topics will not be addressed in this article.

Read the full article from Plant Services here.

Leave No Fault Behind

The idea behind Fault Zone Analysis is to ensure that we are looking at each of the critical fault zones to make sure that we are not missing an anomaly that will someday become a serious fault. As a reminder these fault zones are Power Quality, Power Circuit, Insulation, Stator, Rotor, and Air Gap. Not looking at the health of each of these zones on a regular basis will expose your electric motor to an unknown fault and reduced life expectancy. Sometimes we see indications of developing anomalies on more than one zone and think they must be related to a common source. It is possible for a single anomaly to influence more than one fault zone, but we must confirm that with follow-up testing after the repair. Until evidence brings your investigation to a single source, you should act as if multiple fault indications are coming from more than one fault.

To see a case study where two separate faults resulted in a series of motor failures visit the PdMA YouTube Channel at

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-cUONWaudkKReNwC0PPXMQ

Decatur Industrial Helps New Distillery with Project Motors Modernization

Specifying 63 motors with horsepower ratings ranging from 2HP to 250HP to achieve the optimum performance and reliability at a true state-of-the-art distillery is a major undertaking for project engineers. Some of the hardest work comes in the beginning stages – researching, identifying the appropriate design, and then working with the motor prints and drawings.

As a valued solutions partner, D.I.E. was asked to support the project engineers in specifying designs including motors for custom applications. These applications required comprehensive VFD-Duty motor designs that the OEM could not provide.

Our customer required the exact drawings be included for each motor quoted in the project.
D.I.E. came up with an organizational method to make it more efficient for the engineers to review and approve the drawings – saving them time and resources and eliminating any confusion that could majorly affect the project.

Simply clicking on the drawing number within the spreadsheet takes the engineers to a sheet with the exact motor drawing image.

2. Once at the drawing image sheet, double-clicking on the image will open it in ADOBE PDF. This allows our customer’s engineers to rapidly and accurately access the motor drawings for each application on the project.

Do you have a project you need help with?
Let Decatur Industrial Electric make your job easier. Contact us today.

Consideration for Using VFDs with Standard Motors

There are areas of concern when trying to control both speed and cost.

End users desiring speed/and or torque control often buy variable-frequency drives (VFDs) to modify existing applications where a standard induction motor is in place. Frequently, they try to control costs by using that existing standard induction motor. Before taking that path, however, it is best to consider a few areas of concern with the approach….

Read the full article here.