Vibration Monitoring of Rotating Machines Using MEMS Accelerometer

Heavy industries face major problems since different types of mechanical failures can originate in rotating machines. Analytical approaches have demonstrated that vibration monitoring has tremendous potential in detecting and localizing defects in the machines. There are different technologies available for vibration sensing. Though MEMS accelerometer is slowly becoming an alternate method for vibration monitoring of rotating machines, yet it has not been fully explored for a much wider application base. This paper proposes the basic design for the development of a low cost MEMS accelerometer based vibration sensor by integrating the basic sensor and intelligence of vibration analysis, together. This module can easily be deployed for different rotating machines for vibration monitoring. Sensitivity of the sensor, effectiveness of the proposed intelligence in signal processing and their performance are tested for a 7.5KW, 3?, 440V, 4 pole squirrel-cage induction motor. The experiments are carried out to check the ability to detect the fault frequency peaks under different fault combinations. The results presented here are found to be highly promising.