Reliability Engineer Daniel McEvoy has been working at Motion’s Specialised Engineering Services division for ten years. His role includes a number of responsibilities to ensure that machinery operates optimally. One of his main duties is equipment shaft alignment.

Machine alignment is an essential component of a viable maintenance strategy for rotating equipment. It helps reduce unexpected machine failure and ensures that equipment operates effectively and efficiently without causing any issues. Daniel discusses his work on blower shaft alignment in particular, which has featured in many of his projects.
Blowers are critical equipment in plants and can run full-time. Daniel explains, “Our job is to check the alignment of the equipment and ensure it is within acceptable tolerance for operation. Tolerances required can either be specified by the OEM, customer or from a standard or tolerance table.
“We’ll work to the specified tolerances and perform alignments to achieve the best result. We do this to avoid stressing the shafts, couplings, bearings, and seals.”
He says proper alignment of blower shafts is crucial, as misalignment can cause premature bearing failure, high temperatures, excessive vibration, contamination and could possibly even lead to high power consumption.
Daniel recalls a job at a water treatment plant in Brisbane, where excess vibration was reported after a motor replacement. Motion engineers were called in to investigate and ensure the alignment of the motor and blower were correct.
Daniel emphasises the importance of this task, stating, “This specific plant was running 24/7, so the equipment could operate as reliably as possible to avoid unwanted or premature failures in the middle of the night.”
In this case, as with other comparable realignment jobs, aligning the motor to the blower and carrying out all the essential checks takes about four hours. Daniel says, “It’s not a lengthy process compared to the benefits of performing it.  The result of such jobs is that it should extend the life of those pieces of equipment or at the very least help them operate to the expected design life.”
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