Fluid Condition Monitoring in Capital Equipment Maintenance

Industrial manufacturing processes can be extremely sensitive to the presence of contaminants in fluids. It is important to monitor the condition of your fluid to meet cleanliness standards and avoid potential critical system failures.

Detection of potential contamination excursions is critical for effective preventative and predictive maintenance. Effective fluid condition monitoring systems highlight potential problems with the process or equipment to avoid unplanned downtime. Unforeseen stoppages repair costs can greatly impact budgets but can be avoided by implementing preventative and predictive maintenance strategies.

Process engineers also need to assess the cleanliness of fluid in capital equipment to maintain fluid cleanliness standards. As such, fluid condition monitoring technologies are an essential asset to improving operation and reliability. They deliver valuable advantages to the overall bottom line – proactively identifying a potential system failure due to contaminants.

Cloud Based (online) Fluid Condition Monitoring is the fastest and most convenient method for customers and manufacturers to check the cleanliness of their systems, there’s no wait time, minimized risk of inaccuracy, and they can be accessed at any time. By eliminating the human element and middlemen, errors and outliers are usually obvious and, since past samples are easily stored by the manufacturer, curious results can be compared to historical data. The collection of this data is particularly valuable because it enables manufacturers to utilize predictive analytics. That means seeing and solving problems before they become too large to manage easily.

Having a bank of real-time data can be paired with various software programs to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate potential issues before they arise. When slight changes in fluid properties are detected, manufacturers can investigate and make corrections before these variations balloon into large and expensive maintenance challenges. Maintenance can be standardized and when results don’t need to be waited on, crises aren’t so pressing anymore. Filter management is also an important element of managing your system and reducing costs.

When managing fluid systems, filters are essential for maintaining system health and consistent performance. To ensure that systems flow seamlessly, operators need to regularly monitor the life of their filters. Not doing so risks unnecessary costs in both reduced efficiency and eventual labor time when the problem becomes too big to ignore. When the entire system is shut down for major repairs, operators will wish they took time to check the indicators of a filter that needs changing. Let’s explore the best methods for checking up on your filter’s life.

Before we jump into the maintenance process, it’s worth examining what demands regular filter changes in the first place. When differential pressure throughout the filter element puts enough pressure on a valve in the filter system, this can allow upstream fluid to bypass the filter. Unfiltered liquids head downstream, causing problems of all kinds including a lower-quality product and further damage to the system. Differential pressure reaches certain levels that are marked critical. There’s little nuance to this on/off switch. What this means is that predicting and resolving problems boils down to having the best possible access to the levels of differential pressure. A regimented filter monitoring regimen is an important part of fluid condition monitoring. 

What does your filter monitoring regimen look like? Is it a hands-on process? How often do you check in? Do you utilize a digital on/off style indicator? These questions are a good starting place to find potential inefficiencies in your filter maintenance. While letting a filter lose quality and cause problems down the line, there’s also the potential to lose efficiency by changing one too early. The conventional on/off indicator risks such a premature swap, as it fails to qualify the actual state of your filter. A continuous monitoring system puts more information in the operator’s hands, showing more accurately how close a filter is to the end of its life.

Changing your filters at the right time is the key to streamlining efficiency and avoiding unnecessary costs. Doing so with real-time data from the cloud and access to historical data makes not only predicting problems but resolving problems more efficient. With Pall’s Crixus Fluid Condition Monitoring Platform clients report maintenance costs being cut by up to 25% and outage reductions up to 50%, taking advantage of alarms that are programmable to unique system requirements. 

As we’ve discussed, the most effective way to monitor the condition of your fluids is implementing online monitoring, which makes for a more efficient and convenient workflow. Prior to online monitoring, taking advantage of predictive analytics was prohibitively expensive and only as valuable as the quality of the results used in the first place. If a technician involved in any of those samples made a mistake, the entire dataset could be untrustworthy. Manufacturers looking to find savings and efficiency have found both in online monitoring, which helps to cut corners and streamline processes at multiple levels. 

That’s where Pall’s Crixus Fluid Condition Monitoring Platform enters the picture. By continually monitoring both fluid condition and filter performance with in-line sensors that are tapped into a cloud-based reporting system, Pall’s Crixus Platform monitors are true predictive maintenance tools. This monitoring goes beyond taking the level of differential pressure and displaying it for you to evaluate and develop a maintenance schedule. While conventional remote monitoring allows check-ins at multiple systems from multiple rooms, the system monitors allow for an enterprise monitoring dashboard, meaning access to system health from nearly anywhere. 

To learn more about the Pall Crixus Fluid Condition Monitoring Platform, visit our dedicated page to watch our Crixus video, download informative whitepapers, and calculate your savings!