Corporate Report 2014: SKF USA Electric Motor Co.

Knowing the electrical condition of motors helps avert high costs of unplanned downtime.

It’s never a matter of if an industrial electric motor will fail—it’s when. Motors eventually fail at some point. The challenge for most maintenance professionals is to maximize service life of each and every motor their organizations depend upon. Electrical failures account for the second-highest percentage of motor failures (second only to mechanical, or bearing failures), and insulation degradation accounts for the lion’s share of electrical root causes of failure.

The dielectric strength of motor insulation weakens over time as insulation quality naturally degrades. Such degradation is often accelerated by environmental factors like excessive heat, contamination from industrial chemicals, dust and moisture, or excessive voltage spikes such as lightning-induced line surges.

The ability to assess the strength of motor insulation over a motor’s service life helps maintenance professionals identify when motors should be pulled for service or replacement. It’s critical to identify such issues well before any imminent possibility of internal arcing (also known as a fault) that would rapidly cause a motor to fail. Such failures will not only destroy an expensive motor, but can unexpectedly stop or reduce production with substantially adverse impacts on revenue generation, never mind profitability.

It’s valuable as well to identify what may be causing recurrent problems with production machinery, such as why a motor trips randomly, or why excessive heat is generated at the motor. The root causes of such issues can be either mechanical or electrical, and more often than not the mechanical maintenance staff is at odds with the electrical staff over what the true root causes of a problem are. Such disputes can be resolved by monitoring motor/machine systems for any out-of-tolerance issues involving power fed to a motor or the load placed upon the motor. The ability to identify probable causes of motor trips that lie beyond the motor itself can save an organization time, money, and a lot of unnecessary internal disputes!

SKF’s Electric Motor Condition Monitoring solutions are the industry’s leading portfolio of motor testing and troubleshooting products. SKF’s static-state motor testing equipment includes the automated, portable Baker AWA-IV series of programmable motor analyzers, the highly configurable series of portable Baker DX analyzers, and a supporting lineup of products and accessories for testing AC and DC motors and components across the entire spectrum of motor sizes. SKF’s dynamic-state motor analysis products include the portable EXP4000. The EXP4000 can monitor operating motors via a connection at the motor, a connection within a motor control cabinet (MCCs), or from safely outside of an MCC via a permanently-installed SKF EP1000 connector. Finally, SKF’s NetEP Online Motor Analysis System provides Internet-accessible visibility into operating motor performance and health 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to alert maintenance professionals of any issues that need to be resolved before they lead to costly unplanned downtime.

To learn more about electrical motor test and monitoring, visit SKF online at
www.skfusa.com/electricmotortesting, or contact SKF Electric Motor Condition Monitoring in Fort Collins, Colorado, at
970-282-1200 (email: sales.cmcfc@skf.com).

SKF USA Inc.
Electric Motor Condition Monitoring
4812 McMurry Ave., Suite 100
Fort Collins, CO 80525
970-282-1200
sales.cmcfc@skf.com