This post is based on the failure of a critical baghouse environmental fan at one of my favorite clients. The fan wheel was approximately 6’ diameter and had a 3 15/16” shaft. The bearings were split housing spherical rollers. The motor was a 350 HP (I believe) and it operated at 1200 RPM. I want to be clear that the issues that brought it about and complicated the repairs are not unique to this plant. But, this is how we went from the fan beating itself to death with a 2+IPS vibration, back to a normal operating condition.
The fan was actually a victim of its own success as it sat out in the “North 40” alone and had given the plant very little grief over the years. Consequently, it had pretty much slipped from the plant’s radar, (the plant was still working on Planning, Scheduling, and effective PMs). It was only routinely visited by the oiler and intermittently visited by the mechanics or electricians, usually on a trouble call or as they sailed by on an electric scooter. The fan was monitored monthly by a vibration contractor but he wasn’t yet seasoned. He had the confidence of his employer but was still trying to gain the confidence of the plant, he was viewed as a somewhat angry young man as he felt the plant ignored his reports. In retrospect, I was part of the problem as I had read his reports for several months and had seen him draw what looked to me some questionable conclusions. I tended to tell him to show me the data on his important calls which always pissed him off. He was not interested in doing vibration troubleshooting, he wanted to collect monthly data and send in a report.
The plant had a local motor shop that they liked to use and they both seemed to believe all vibration problems had to be balance problems. So when the plant decided the fan was vibrating too much (totally arbitrary as they had no spec or operating meter) the motor shop was called and they would send out a tech to balance it whether it needed it or not.
At this point, we have enough background as the details of the failure are covered in the attached pdf report files. We can move on to what I consider the troubling issues we had with this failure and ultimate repair.
Troubling! After all the feel-good talk that passes for management and the masses try to call Leadership in our modern day, we are left with the central questions of; Just who the hell is responsible for X machines, and how responsible is responsible?
In my experience, I’ve seen many organizations that struggle with the exact problem highlighted in these pages. At the heart of it is, no individual is truly responsible for “IT”. We have great looking organization charts, and we tell each other “we’re going to work together on that one” when the questions get hard or the hours long, but ultimate responsibility is hard to pin down.
In a former life, when I was promoted from a Maintenance Supervisor to the Mechanical Maintenance Manager, the pressure was seriously on to improve operating efficiency and reduce costs. I faced an almost overwhelming task as the maintenance group ran on almost exclusively trouble calls, very few PMs were done and they were typically the “check it” variety.
For a few months, I tried to analyze what was going on to understand what do we need to do differently to get better results? One of my first observations was there seemed to be no detail we couldn’t screw up which lead to my initiative to clean up our lines of responsibility. Several of my predecessors had promoted the “we all work together on this” and it had morphed over time into a supervisor was responsible for X portion of the work and then it went to another for the Y portion, and then on and on until ultimately it was completed. Often after way too long and with marginal results. The Trades were also assigned work the same way.
So what to do. We worked out who is responsible for what and made it crystal clear to everyone that they were responsible for all work, beginning to end, in their areas of responsibility. They were given great latitude to act but when their portion of the railroad runs off the tracks, “They are the only SOB I’m going to come see”.
It was culture shock for a long time but it worked.
