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Cooling towers are not BOP
anymore!
Cooling towers deserve better
protection from the causes of vibration. More and more, failure of a mechanical
"vibration" switch to adequately protect your cooling tower may mean
production cutbacks, more
costly repairs, or negative impact on safety
issues! We have a better solution.
TEZZCO's Liberator & IMI Vibration
Switches: more
than vibration monitoring- it's cooling tower reliability
and uptime:
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IMI Vibration Switches: Installed for protection
24/7
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TEZZCO's Liberator: Small lightweight low cost vibration
data collection
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Low
enough cost to outfit all your operators who can take
vibration data on rounds
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Vibration analysts love the
lightweight, long battery life, flexibility in use, and long-term source
stability
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Outstanding & knowledgeable technical support before and
after the sale
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TEZZCO owner Tom
Treharne has 30 years plus of machinery protection,
balancing, alignment, and vibration analysis. From cooling
towers to 650 mw turbine generator sets and everything in
between serving a global customer base. His
hand-picked staff is ready to serve your needs.
There are a lot of money saving
benefits to our approach. It is also technically
superior to either no protection at all, accelerometers only
mounted on the gear box, or dependence on the mistaken belief that cooling
towers are protected by mechanical shock switches: SHOCK. NOT
RADIAL VIBRATION But first, we have to get past the
misinformation and acceptance of mechanical switches as adequate
protection for cooling towers. That's what this site and
the free technical paper download is all about.
You probably know that an electronic
vibration switch offers substantially better protection from
increasing radial vibration than does a mechanical
vibration switch (often called earthquake switches for good
reason). Mechanical switches are
called "earthquake switches" because something really bad must
happen to your cooling tower to make them work: blades coming
off, parts skipping through parking lots, LOST PRODUCTION IN
SUMMER MONTHS.
What are your expectations for the
management of the machines in your plant?
Most of your machines are not on a
run to failure operation/maintenance program. But maybe
your cooling towers are and you don't even know it.
Mechanical vibration switches are on tens of thousands of
cooling towers and MAY notify operations of a tower disaster. If
it's in the summer time, you will likely have production
cutbacks and damage will be severe costing more money, time &
production. That's why some companies make good money
renting cooling capacity. The following graph illustrates
the complete inadequacy of mechanical vibration switches to
sense the growing levels of radial vibration at cooling tower
component speeds of 100 to 1800 rpm.
The log scale of the graph is
deceptive. The radial vibration levels in the
red triangle for the mechanical switch
are 4
to 20 times worse than the BAD level!
Maybe that's why whole cooling towers can be seen moving before
things let loose or switches activate.
Your better solution: the
IMI electronic vibration switch replacement for mechanical vibration switches.
For cooling tower protection,
you get a switch designed for cooling tower protection. There's more: for detailed analysis, your
operators and vibration analyst has access to the dynamic signal to find the root cause
of vibration and keep your
machine running: that's machine uptime and maximizing
machine uptime is a great goal.
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The
IMI vibration switch
is an electronic vibration sensor like the ones used in
vibration analysis
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It has switches or triacs for positive cooling tower
protection
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Your best choice whether replacing mechanical switches
or starting from scratch
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The total installed cost
is easily justified: it's a no brainer.
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The benefit?
You get
effective cooling tower protection,
not disaster confirmation
The
IMI vibration switch is easy
to select, buy, & install: one model for cooling
towers, one best place to mount the
685B vibration switch, one source of technical support.
Cooling tower protection: Monitor radial
vibration, not shock.
TEZZCO offers an electronic vibration
switch
that is
a better
solution to protect cooling towers than mechanical vibration switches
and easily replaces them. The
problem is that a mechanical vibration switch is the poorest
choice for monitoring the running radial vibration of the
cooling tower fan, gearbox and motor. Mechanical vibration switches were designed
to monitor the major shocks of reciprocating
equipment such as engines and reciprocating conpressors, not for the rotating equipment on cooling towers.
They
are "shock
switches" triggered by acceleration & unsuited to
sense radial vibration of rotating equipment in velocity or
displacement at the speeds of your cooling tower fan, gearbox,
and motor.
Running cooling towers to failure
Mechanical vibration switches can signal a disastrous
failure but seldom if ever alert you to growing problems that are the
cause of elevated vibration levels: the precursors to
failure. That's a "run to failure" philosophy, which for
good reasons, has gone by the boards in most maintenance
operations. The problem is, they have been "hyped" as
vibration switches and only relatively recently has one
manufacturer renamed the shock switches.
Cooling towers: They're not BOP anymore.
To many operations, cooling towers are
still designated as BOP
(balance of plant), a designation for rotating equipment that does
not warrant the same consideration as "more important machines".
Most plants have less than 10% excess cooling capacity in hot
months.
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Lose a cooling tower in
the summer & fall below 100% production. Now what is better protection from excessive vibration worth?
The $200 to $300 dollar difference in a switch? A
power plant up north just lost a tower during peak summer
demand and had to cut back output from the station. How
about your operation?
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Have a fan blade fly out of the cell, skip on a paved area and
come to rest in the plant manager's office. That's a slight
exaggeration to make a point: It was the office next door to
his but the call got to operations fast, perhaps about the
same time the mechanical switch shut the motor down.
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Maybe add the cost of a
new gearbox on short lead-time, premium shipping cost, and
unplanned downtime.
Cooling Tower Owners, OEMs,
Consultants, & Service Companies
TEZZCO knows that working together for
better cooling tower protection is important to our mutual
success. There are legacy issues to overcome &
ingrained misinformation to correct. Expectations for the protection
of the owner's cooling towers should be elevated. It's up to the owners to
specify the better solution, but we all can support that
decision with good information. We welcome inquiries from cooling tower owners,
cooling tower manufacturers, cooling tower consultants, and
those who service cooling towers anywhere in the world.
TEZZCO is ready to help set you on the path to maximum cooling tower
uptime.
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