AMETHYST: Automatic Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery Faults

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses automatic diagnosis of rotating machinery faults using AMETHYST system. The purpose of AMETHYST is to automate the diagnosis and interpretation of the spectral data. This results in allowing lower skilled people to use vibration based condition monitoring, providing cost savings to existing customers, and, eventually, widening the base of companies which can use condition monitoring. It is a very slow process to actually diagnose a fault. On a typical eight-hour route collecting data, a dozen measurement points will often be in alarm and require diagnosis. It can easily take an experienced person 4–8 hours to manually go through the steps needed to develop the diagnosis. AMETHYST does the same diagnosis fully automatically, the end user must spend approximately 30 seconds starting the analysis and then a report is produced with the results. This leads to a direct times saving of four hours potentially for every route collected. This also represents a reduction factor of 500 in the time needed for the task. For large corporations in active use, this represents a half man years savings immediately.