Industry Case Studies - Decatur Industrial Electric

The following are case studies proving total cost of ownership savings for Decatur Industrial Customers in a variety of industries.

It’s Time Again for Spring Cleaning

It is time to get motors ready for the long hot summer. For many this includes cleaning their critical motors and other equipment for the upcoming summer months.

We generally recommend preventative maintenance during a regularly scheduled outage. Fall and spring is another good time to have it on the calendar.

Top tips for maintaining your electric motors:

Develop a general maintenance and cleaning routine
Check the motor’s lubrication
Regularly inspect the bearings
Reduce or eliminate vibrations
Inspect the rotor and stator
Record your findings

Or – let us do the work for you. Click the button below.

Cleaning the exterior of a motor, including the can and fan cover will help extend the life of the motor. See pictures of motors pulled from a customer’s recent spring cleaning!

Decatur Industrial Provides Custom Fabricated Solution for Wind Turbine

A turbine of this size can produce over $1,000,000 of electricity annually. With the replacement motor’s estimated lead-time being 6-months or more, this repair could easily be a savings of up to half-a-million dollars.

A Decatur Industrial WIND customer had a motor damaged during installation. The motor suffered a broken stator foot and a replacement motor from the OEM would not be available for many months. The foot and stator yolk are cast as one piece and not replaceable without replacing the entire stator yolk assembly. The customer engaged us to find a way to repair the motor so it could immediately go back into service.

Decatur Industrial machinists knew that without all four mounting feet on the motor it was unusable in the application, preventing the turbine from operating. Our team got to work machining the entire side of the stator with the fractured foot. We milled the yolk to remove the remainder of the damaged foot support structure. We also removed the rear foot on the damaged side of the stator along with the support structure. A complete new front and rear foot assembly with support structure was machined to fit the stator. The foot had to mount precisely to the stator and provide the exact footprint with bolt pattern to allow the motor to bolt into the turbine. We installed the new foot assembly and then replaced the damaged bearings. The motor was fully assembled, test run, and shipped to the wind farm. The farm installed the repaired motor which enabled the turbine to come back on-line, producing power for customers.

The High Cost of Reactive Maintenance

With proactive maintenance, sometimes time and money have to be spent to save more money and time in the long run. We have all been there, taking time and budgeting is hard sometimes. However, if you’re relying on reactive maintenance every time, your assets will sustain much more severe damage than they would have with a predictive maintenance schedule.

This situation we are highlighting here is all too familiar. We know many of you recognize it! This concrete customer used to pull this particular motor annually for inspection due to its extremely harsh environment, but it had been over two years now since it was last proactively pulled.

The motor came in covered in debris (concrete). Due to the thickness of the debris, the motor was unable to “breathe” and overheated. Experts agree that excessive heat causes rapid deterioration of motor winding insulation. The common rule states that insulation life is cut in half for every 10 C of additional heat to the windings above rating.

Predictive maintenance helps you perform maintenance when it’s essential for the asset’s health and when it’s most cost-effective.

Proactive Motor Inspections Save Customer Downtime and Money

Decatur Industrial was asked to perofrm a motor inspection and motor cleaning during an already scheduled outage for a customer. During the inspection, one of our technicians found an end cover to be rotting away due to leakage.

After removing the end cover it was determined that it was in too bad of shape to re-install when cleaning was completed.

Since the motor was going to be down for few more days, it was covered to keep any foreign materials from entering the motor. The end cover was brought back to our shop where D.I.E had an end cover made to replace it. One finished, it was installed on the same motor.

This total project cost less than $3,000 to the customer. A repair likely would have been close to $100,000 and a new motor would have cost close to $200,000.

Finished project!

Leaking Vertical Motor. What’s the Cause?

When a motor is pulled from storage and installed, it is frustrating to the customer when there is an immediate problem. In this case, the customer had a leaking vertical motor starting from the install date. It had been rebuilt by another motor repair shop prior and the customer did not understand what was causing the problem.

D.I.E was engaged and performed a disassembly and evaluation to try and find the root cause. We found the oil sight glass used on the upper bearing was not marked correctly. In addition, the motor had a lubrication specification ID tag that was not correct to the motor or reservoir sizes, lending itself to operator error.

After researching the OEM motor specifications, we added the correct oil capacity information next to a new, correctly sized, sight glass. We also removed the lubrication ID tag that was no longer correct. The savings from avoiding this occurrence again is close to $15,000 per incident.

Interested in more information on this subject?

Read our previously published TECH TIP: Oil Level of Vertical Machines.