Practical approach to condition monitoring of MV drives

In modern plants one encounters a combination of very intelligent assets, traditional simple but critical assets, as well as access to process control and automation system. All existing information should be combined in order to optimize life cycle management of assets and thus to reduce maintenance costs and improve process/asset performance. This need determines some basic features of modern condition monitoring systems. Large drives are frequently used to power critical equipment, thus maintaining them in good running order is essential. In the process of performing their control function, drives collect and produce large quantity of data, which can be used in condition monitoring context. In this paper we present some requirements regarding collection and analysis of drive signals for diagnostic purposes and present some practical implementations of the system solution.