The IVS ‘Watchdog’ feature monitors your equipment full-time. ‘Watchdog’ acquires a full set of PdM quality data upon alert – in addition to regular data. Rather than running out to take data on alert, take decisive action and step briskly ahead for the solution. IVS ‘Watchdog’ feature sends you instant email alerts to keep you ahead of those short-term events and quickly developing faults.

Cooling Towers

Prevent unexpected cooling tower failures while increasing plant efficiency

Cooling tower failures are expensive and most monitoring and maintenance programs don't give the advance warning you need. Standard walk arounds, visual inspections, and reactionary maintenance programs are based on assumptions, trend extrapolations, and unwieldy 'too far in the past' data.

The resulting delay before degradation issues such as worn bearings, poor oil quality, damaged shafts or excessive vibrations become known mean that cooling tower failures are often too close to avoid catastrophic failures and its compounding expense and inconvenience.

Who wants the unplanned downtime while emergency repairs are carried out?

Who needs the costly delays and interruptions to production while parts are being sourced?

Wouldn't it be so much better if you could understand the real state of cooling tower components before issues arise?

Wouldn't your plant run more smoothly if you could plan for the future by anticipating the parts needed then scheduling maintenance during preferred periods? Yes, of course. And with timely data, information, and decision tools you can.

What are the main reasons cooling towers fail?

Cooling towers are critical systems that must often cope with short periods of intense loading. The most common causes of cooling towers failures are:

Gearbox

Water intrusion through damaged seals
Oil condition, levels and temperature
Bearing temperatures and chipped, broken or worn teeth

Fan Blades

Broken—even the smallest hairline cracks can set up significant vibrations and lead to huge cell failures
Loose or unbalanced fan blades enable a vicious cycle of vibration causing damage and increasing vibration severity to the blades and the gearboxes

Misalignment

Drive shafts, gears, and bearings can create severe vibration stresses that lead to greater component failures.

Couplings

Dried, cracked, or damaged

The presence of any one of these issues could lead to sudden premature cooling tower failure and will have a crucial impact on your plant efficiency and adversely impact your maintenance budget.

How does this influence or impact plant efficiency?

Whether you are running a power generation facility or a petrochemical plant, the critical pressure and temperature engineering allowances (as per the basis documents) required for optimal thermal efficiency depend on the peak performance of motors, gearboxes, bearings, and fans.

Poor performance in any one of these areas could have a negative impact on the operating efficiency of your plant. The IVS online monitoring program ensures the thermal efficiency of your facility’s Rankine cycle by detecting in real-time sub-optimal performance in any part of your cooling tower operations.

For power generation facilities this could effectively mean increasing the Rankine cycle efficiency by several basis points. For petrochemical plants this equates to a potential reduction of the amount of water expended in cooling per barrel of processed oil. Whether its megawatts electrical or barrels of oil, maintaining optimal cooling efficiency is important to your bottom line.

Keep your cool with IVS information and analysis - anytime, anywhere

IVS is one of the only monitoring systems that gives you all the information you need to make those important maintenance decisions now for increased efficiency and productivity. Traditional inspections create largely useless paper trails of data that are already out-of-date by the time they’ve been trended and analyzed.

Visual inspections also miss the early warning signs and the nature of cooling tower operations make it almost impossible to carry out a thorough inspection of all aspects while in operation.

IVS online monitoring gives you real-time analysis of those critical cooling tower elements that you can’t see:

Vibration monitoring
Oil condition and temperature
Particulates
Water ingression
Damaged shafts, couplings, and bearings
Chipped or broken teeth
Misaligned gears and shafts or loose fittings

The IVS system offers you a full suite of continuous information and decision making tools including:

PdM (predictive maintenance) diagnostic tools
Quality vibration analysis including; FFT’s, overalls, and bearing temperatures
Oil quality monitoring

Too often important warning signs are missed in the delay between data collection and analysis. IVS provides continuous in-depth analysis so that your cooling towers don’t miss a beat and you keep your cool.

Why is oil condition monitoring important?

Oil condition is responsible for 40-45% of gearbox anomalies. Those anomalies such as the presence of particulates in the oil or excessive oil temperature can indicate your cooling tower is months, days or even hours and minutes away from failure.

Changes in oil condition may also indicate the presence of water and is indicative of cracked or damaged seals.

Most monitoring systems don’t have this critical ability to monitor oil quality, particulates, and oil temperature - most facilities only monitor the lubrication quality once every 1 to 3 months. IVS keeps you in the loop every minute of every day.

Vibration is another critical warning sign and is responsible for around 30-35% of the gearbox anomalies detected.

Oil condition and vibration anomalies together account for a massive 95% of gearbox anomalies detected.

IVS gives you both vibration and oil condition tools as part of a truly comprehensive real-time monitoring system – along with bearing temperatures.

What puts IVS ahead of the competition?

Veksys Monitoring – provides real-time performance monitoring allowing you to gather critical data every hour of every day and it’s all accessible anytime, anywhere.

RapidIQ: Any Form • Any Test • Any Survey – provides a thorough health check for all your critical systems and assets via:

Operational surveillance testing
Preventive maintenance (PMs) tasks
Acceptance testing
Equipment rounds and process inspections.

Priori - a predictive analytical model-based diagnostics (MBD) tool detects emerging anomalies and performance variation trends that would have previously remained undetected. Priori analyses dynamic processes, making allowances for normal system variations while still detecting subtle changes that may lead to a system failure.

Watchdog – anomalies in trend values trigger instant data sets and email alerts allowing rapid intervention before expensive failures take place.

These four tools work together to keep your cooling towers working at optimal efficiency.

Next Wind Turbines – Increasing Lead Time to Failures

Veksys Online monitoring system puts that power of the future into your hands right now with informative decision tools.