Dr. Karl Hoffower with Failure Prevention Associates

The Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott MacKenzie

Industrial Talk is onsite at the 30th Annual SMRP conference and speaking with to Dr. Karl Hoffower, Executive Director at Failure Prevention Associates about "Innovative vibration solutions to ensure your assets operate at peak performance". Get the answers to your "vibration" questions along with Karl's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview! Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2023. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

KARL HOFFOWER'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-karl-hoffower-dc-crl-28a28315/ Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/failure-prevention-associates-inc./ Company Website: https://failureprevention.com/

PODCAST VIDEO:

https://youtu.be/ugwV-cUGmso

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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS vibration, asset, people, Karl, foundation, fan, industrial, foot, problem, machine, visual, find, broken, professional, maintenance, moving, great, alignment, shaft, conversation 00:00 Industrial Talk is brought to you by Armis. Yes, you were in the digital transformation game. Yes, you need to find trusted companies, trusted individuals to help you along with that journey. The Armis platform delivers complete asset intelligence, you know what that means? insights into your connected assets, you're in the digital transformation game, you have to have that insights into what is connected. Go to Armis.com. Find out more, you will not be disappointed. Industrial Talk is brought to you by Arduino the original all in one IoT platform. That's right, go out to arduino.cc and you will find documentation you will find devices powerful boards to help you with your digital transformation journey. It's all there. Go out to arduino.cc Find out more see how you can connect with these professionals to help you along with your digital transformation journey arduino.cc. 01:07 Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's get Alright, 01:25 welcome to industrial talk the number one industrial related podcast in the universe, Karl, and it's backed up by data so don't even begin to debate the fact that that is a fact it's data. And we are broadcasting live from SMRP. This is the 30th annual and I gotta tell you last year it was this one's better attended. You get a car. Yeah, 01:48 I totally agree. Well, there 01:49 you go, man. He's my wingman. His name is Karl. Whatever, I'll go with that. All right. Once again, we're brought to you by Hexagon Hexagon EAM that is a product that you need to look more into if you're in an asset management if you're looking to have a system that can definitely capture all of those assets. That's Hexagon EAM find out more go out to their website. All right, Karl, wing man. Yes, sir. It's always a pleasure to be able to have a conversation with Q. 02:19 Always a pleasure to be with Scott Mackenzie. 02:23 And the number one industrial related podcasts in the universe. Yes, right. Dr. Karl, Dr. Karl, Colin, Dr. Karl, are you having a good conference? 02:32 I am. I am. It was actually last night was the first night for the expo. Yeah. And the quantity of people that came by the booth was was pretty amazing. So we were talking to other people. And I don't know what we do a little bit different. You know, I've got an opinion on it that we had, well, what 02:48 what, whoa, what's the opinion, don't just leave it there outside of the fact that it's, it's my stellar personality? Well, 02:57 it's a thing of just trying to find out what people would find interesting, and what's really going to help solve solutions for them. So we came out with a new product. It's, we call it visual vibration. And basically, you can use your cell phone to shoot a slomo video will convert it with our software. And basically, you'll be able to visualize the vibration that's happening to the asset or machine or the piping of the foundation very rapidly. And so you can deploy this, everybody carries himself on these days. And almost everybody has a slow mo video capability. So it's universal in our neck of the woods with maintenance reliability, and say, hey, something's vibrating. It sounds a little weird. I'll shoot a little video on it. Let's get it rolling. 03:40 But so let's say we look at that visual, but your vibration guy, yes, yeah, you'll go out there you'll with you get your tools and you'd get your tool belt and you go out there and you just determine what that the whatever the status of the vibration status. Are you saying that the visual capabilities that you're talking about also just enhances your ability to go out there and say, Yeah, we need to go out there, we need to do a little bit more investigation. 04:07 So we've been noticing as plants have been aging that more and more concrete foundations are failing. And the vibration happens at the frequency of whatever the machine is turning at. So in the vibration world when whatever Miss speed the machine turns out, we call it the first frequency we're interested in, or the one time because there's things that are multiples of that. Like if you miss a line two shafts, you'll get two times the turning speed or to time. So you'll see a high one time well then you go okay, what is that? Is that misalignment is unbalanced. Is that a resonance? Is it a crack foundation looseness, things like that? And that's where that subtlety of that diagnosis is more difficult. So 04:47 yeah, does that makes sense? You're just saying that being able to visually say like, yeah, I see it, I see it. Yeah, that is I don't I don't have the the in depth analytics at that particular time. I need to I need to call Dr. Karl and come up with some sort of a tactical solution to what's taking place here, if any 05:08 certainly, yeah, that's like one of the things we had, this is a large to 40 foot long draft fan for a steel mill. And our diagnosis was soft foot of the motor, and the maintenance professionals, there's you're disagreeing with us. So we shot a video, and you can clearly see how the thing is having a soft issue. And then I said, Let's verify it because as a doctor, right, you don't want to do a single test and make a determination of a treatment or a course in therapy without having multiple things confirming your diagnosis. So we said, okay, the vibration is showing this, I did phase analysis, which is a way of looking at how the machines are rocking. And that helped confirm it. Then we shot the video, and it was clearly software. I said one more test, let's put a dial indicator on every foot and you loosen the ball. Let's see how much the machine moves. And so we did the first drive and feet the left on the right. And they moved three Mills, we did the non driving feet, one of the move three mills and the fourth foot moves nine mills. And that's the definitive test for a soft foot condition. 06:12 For the software conditions, soft foot soft foot condition. I see I see what you say chair. Now when I gotta dive even a little bit Don't. Don't text me listeners. But when you say nine mils, you're how do you measure it? How do you measure that? I mean, is that 06:30 a dial indicator? Yeah, okay, we put a dial indicator on the foot. And then we loosen the pressure, we loosen the bolt, and we see how far does a frame move relative to the base. So whenever you bolt something down, and you tighten it down, right, you're taking that last little bit of space between the machine and the and the actual base, right, and you're compressing it down to get it to hold fast. So a soft foot condition can either be a deficit in the machine or a deficit in the foundation or a combination. And it is a crucial step in precision alignment of machines to make sure that the bases and the foundations are relatively flat, so that when you walk machine down and you tighten it down, you don't get any distortion on the frame. So when we said nine Mills, we're talking a 1,000th of an inch. Yeah, 07:21 that's that's, yeah, that's, that's the point. It's like, oh, I can't I can't see that. 07:26 Can't see that. No, that's the thing about maintenance, it's difficult for many people to understand is is they go, you know, this thing's good enough? Well, it depends on what's good enough for you do you want it to last six months or six years, the more precision maintenance, you apply precision maintenance techniques you apply to installing or equipment, the longer it's going to run. That's why we use laser shaft alignment. You know, Ludacris greatest company in the world for learning about laser shaft alignment. They've been promoting that for 30 and 40 years now, because they found that when you use lasers to precision ly align to different shafts, you can get them down to having a deficit of less than two mils. 08:03 So back to that statement that you breezed over real quick. If I am committed to precision. There is a statistical improvement. Yes. Of that life of that asset. Yes. So even even when it comes down to just Mills, correct. 08:23 Yeah. So that's why a good mill right has dial indicators, a good mill, right, awesome. A precision alignment system. And you can do alignment with dial indicators, reverse dialing has been a common practice for a long time. It takes a long time. It's why people switch to lasers, because they're just as precise if and they're faster than a dial in the air. But when it comes to checking for soft fluid, the gold standard is using your dial indicator to measure when I loosen this foot, how much is it raised? Right? When I when I run a bolt the sucker down and crank on it. Am I getting equal pressure on all four feet? Or in this case with the microphone three? Yeah, yeah, no, I 09:00 did. So 09:01 if you have a deficit of one, what'll happen is it will pull the frame of torque it. That'll take the alignment of the bearings off a little bit, that'll put pressure on the shaft and all of a sudden, I bet excessively can start spinning in a circle spinning in November, 09:17 but But let's say I mean, I can't I can't see middles Correct. I can't it's so so if I'm a maintenance professional, right. And and it just gets down to it, my my brother in new there as he serves his phone. I'm trying to be very deep here. And you have to ask me, because I'm 09:46 letting people know that I can't call him back for the next hour, because I'm devoting this time to use. 09:50 Thanks. Thank you. But But how does it how does how does that starting point occur? I mean, you don't want to be in a situation where that There's just like, whatever the sound is just ridiculous. And it's obvious that there's a problem. How do you get sort of ahead of that? Well, part 10:08 of it is the decorative. The thing I was talking about at the very beginning is the degradation of our plants, right? Most once a new time, there are new plants being built all the time. However, there is a huge group of plants that are aging that are there. Some places you go to like, Ah, this player has been refining oil since 1922. Right? Yeah. And you can still see some of the stuff. I mean, I've walked into some switchgear, they went to Thomas Edison 10:36 installed that light hole. 10:40 Yeah, so there is an increase in the number of units that have excessive vibration, and they go, but we aligned it. It's, it doesn't have soffit, what's going on, and we find the foundational issues or problems or hype stresses problems. And that's where this visual vibration is nice, because you can visualize a wider area of assets. So and I'll send you a video clip, you can put this on if this goes on YouTube or something, but we have it where there's a process unit and agitator, that shaking, they're breaking small little devices all the time. And the root cause is the actual, concrete foundation that this whole thing sits on is broken, and it's wobbling around. 11:21 So when you when you go into I hate to go into this level level of detail, but it's geeky. When when you go into that two particular situation, and you're saying, Okay, I would imagine it's just me, I'm saying I'm having a problem with this, whatever this mode or this, whatever it is, right? I don't know where it is. I don't know what the problem is, I know that there's a problem, right? You, can you, you have to You're a doctor. So you're going to have to determine where the problem occurs, you're going to have to do some analytics is saying, now it's not there. It's sort of I think it's here. Let's do a little analyst. Yeah, it is. And I would imagine that visual solution allows you to sort of at least direct your eye to maybe the area, 12:05 it does. And that's what makes visual vibrations. Such a unique new offering is that anyone can shoot a cell phone camera video, and be able to visualize very rapidly, what how things are moving and how they're related to each other and their movement, whether it's the piping that's moving, whether it's the foundation, or it's the actual unit. So you can rapidly figure out and communicate that up the line to senior management, saying, Hey, we keep breaking this thing over and over and over again, we try fixing it in different ways. And we've missed the boat because it actually was the foundation. So it helps rapidly communicate to senior management. This is what you need to do. 12:43 But it also does a great job. It's just you know, I'm a visual guy, man. Don't Don't give me squiggly lines. God, I don't want squiggly lines I want I want something that and I can see it. And it and it makes complete sense. It's like, Yep, yeah, yeah, I see it. Yeah. And that that makes that makes complete sense. Oh, there you go. There's a video and I'll give you by the way, this is a podcast, you know, this doctor read it. Now this just sort of put it up. And it's also a video. But I'll give you the clip. And yeah, I need this clip. 13:16 So can you see how that thing's diving right there. That's 13:21 okay, now now we've got dead air now we gotta live comfortable. Because because he can't just leave well enough alone. He's got to just sit there. And so we went down the rabbit. I know, we certainly go down the rabbit hole help you so stand. So really, the reality of this is the fact that we want to have we want to extend you know, through precision, we want to extend the life of that asset. There we go. 13:50 Since jumping into nano Oh, there 13:52 you go moto. 13:52 Oh, check it out. Yeah, see how much that's bending and 13:54 And if you guys were looking at this, like I'm looking at it, there is obvious, obvious things that are taking place. Does that work? I mean, it shouldn't change the camera. There it is. There it is. Is it moving? Yeah, it is it there it 14:12 It is moving? All right. Maybe they got on there. Maybe it didn't. Sorry. AUDIENCE 14:16 That's okay. But no, you what you're what you're striving for what you're really focused on is an extension of that asset uptime. I don't And and, and you're truly in essence, trying to remove that catastrophic situation that can occur with an asset correct, you know, so we 14:35 had that we've had several fans this year that had issues and people would call us and say can you balance this fan? Sure, we can bounce the fan. We assessed the fan and we said it's not out of balance. Because surely it has to be a bounce and think about vibration that can get people in trouble is an elevated level of vibration at turning speed again, a high one time, right because it doesn't matter the payment of the machine, each machine, if it's an unbalanced software misalignment looseness resonance can all vibrate excessively at that same frequency, whatever the