THE CHALLENGE

In tire manufacturing, rubber extrusion machines are critical to the operation of the entire plant and downtime is extremely costly, with unplanned shutdowns potentially resulting in millions of lost productivity.

Key Benefits:

• Early Detection of metallic wear debris due to component failure
• Provides real time asset health indicators
• Detects, sizes, and classifies (ferrous vs. nonferrous) metallic particles
• Minimizes repair costs through early detection
• Maximizes operating life of gearbox
• Detects faults that may be missed via vibration or visual inspection
• Advance notice minimized unscheduled downtime secondary damage.

THE RESULTS

The Trident DM4500 wear debris sensor was installed on a feed roller lubrication system for a rubber extrusion machine with the goal of early indication of mechanical issues and prevention of secondary damage.
Through the monitoring of wear debris the operator was able to know:

• the initiation of the fault
• severity progression as the machine continued to operate
• clear, actionable identification of end-of-life to prevent unplanned downtime

After a baseline wear concentration was established, an alarm limit of 27 ug/liter of debris was decided. In June of 2022, large spikes of ferrous metallic debris were observed, crossing this alarm for the first time but quickly returning to normal levels. 4 months later, this threshold was crossed for the second time and the customer was notified of a potential developing issue.

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