Development of Condition Monitoring System For Mechanical Filler

Abstract

The mechanical filler machine is used for filling the bottle and cans etc. Since the mechanical filler machine is used for continuous production system and operates at very high speed, therefore it is essential that the machine should run without any sudden breakdown in order to prevent a major loss of production. Hence, to minimize the sudden breakdown of the machine, it is mandatory to adopt a preventive and predictive maintenance management system. Therefore, to implement the preventive and predictive management system it becomes necessary to identify the critical parts, components, assemblies etc. Condition monitoring of the entire system is one of the method to detect the probable forthcoming defect in the mechanical filler machine which may be responsible for sudden breakdown of the machine. In current project an attempt has been made to monitor the condition of a mechanical filler machine by developing a vibration sensor and analyzing the vibration of critical parts. The vibration data of the critical parts are collected by selecting the best mounting position of the sensor and the collected vibration data were analyzed using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) method. The modal analysis is carried out to obtain the natural frequency of the critical parts and whereas the operating frequency is obtained using vibration analysis setup. This information is very important for preventing sudden breakdowns as we know that the operating frequency should not exceeds the natural frequency.

The vibration sensor developed in this project is used for the data acquisition and analysis at very low cost with easily available hardware and software. The developed vibration sensor is a substitute of the professional analyzer available in the market which is very expensive. Hence, a significant amount of the cost can be saved by the organization.