Condition monitoring for shot blasting machines: a case study

Read how SAM4 caught a loose blast wheel belt guard before it caused damage to this steel manufacturer's shot blasting machine.

A loose belt guard in one of the blast wheels disturbed the operation of that blast wheel and its neighbor.

SAM4 flagged a sudden spike at the rotational frequency for two of four blast wheels in this shot blasting machine. In the days that followed, the intensity continued to rise for both wheels. The machine’s other two blast wheels showed no such trend. The customer inspected both wheels five weeks later, during a planned maintenance stop. The belt guard on one of the blast wheels had come loose; there was no visible problem on the other. The customer tightened the belt and replaced the damaged belt guard on the faulty wheel, after which both machines returned to normal operation.

“SAM4 kept us from overlooking parts that needed attention but weren’t originally scheduled for inspection during this stop.”

The intensity at the rotational frequency over time, for each of the two blast wheels. The black dots in the bottom graph are for the wheel with the loose belt guard. The blue dots in the top graph are for its neighbor, which had no obvious faults upon inspection. We first alerted the customer at the orange line; they performed maintenance at the green line. Fixing the issues with the first blast wheel returned both wheels to normal operation.