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Decatur Industrial Electric Strategic Vendor Partnership with Siemens Continues with ABB

 

 

 

ABB has completed its acquisition of the Siemens low voltage NEMA motor business. Decatur Industrial Electric is a top national distributor for Siemens motors and looks forward to continued success with ABB, who has also been a valued vendor partner for many years.  

“ABB is a leader in the industry,” said Trent Thompson, President of Decatur Industrial Electric. “We look forward to continue working with ABB and providing our customers the same great motor and service they have come to expect.”

The line of horizontal and vertical induction severe duty and general purpose motors will be re-branded as ABB and reintroduced to the marketplace. In addition, ABB manufactures, designs, and markets the product brands of Baldor-Reliance motors.

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:

  1. Develop a general maintenance and cleaning routine
  2. Check the motor’s lubrication
  3. Regularly inspect the bearings
  4. Reduce or eliminate vibrations
  5. Inspect the rotor and stator
  6. 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.