The advent of unattended sensor technologies has placed a particular challenge on data communication for machine surveillance monitoring. This challenge is magnified when mobile equipment and large geographic territories are involved. The use of satellite communications has recently been applied in an extensive condition-based maintenance program for a large fleet of railroad maintenance equipment. The satellite communications. are a part of an integrated system of sensor, software and communications technologies.

This paper describes the selection and application of sensors for the real-time monitoring of contamination in hydraulic fluid and engine oil. Also discussed will be onboard data collection electronics, onboard satellite transmission hardware and knowledge-based data analysis and exception reporting. The paper will be presented as a case study, and is believed to be the first of its kind for condition-based maintenance employing satellite communications technology.

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Somewhere in your plant there are all-important pieces of production equipment that simply must operate as intended-or else. And most likely the “or else” is too painful to even think about: injuries, catastrophic damage, contract penalties, irate customers, missed shipping dates, junked parts, ballooning costs, a sickly quarterly financial report, and so on. Those critical types of equipment are candidate for machine health monitoring.

To be more precise, the ideal candidates for machine health monitoring is one that is both expensive and sophisticated, provides a crucial and depended-upon work function, has extensive maintenance requirements, and presents a safety risk upon failure. While all mechanical systems don’t involve all those terms, many do meet one or more. And the advent of new sensor and computer technology has more than ever before made machine health monitoring a viable and cost effective technology that manufacturers can use to their advantage particularly today when the almost universal goal in manufacturing is to produce high-quality work at the lowest cost and at the most productive rate a machine can deliver.

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