We come across various kinds of vibrations in our daily routines. The slight shock you feel when you stand on a bridge and a truck passes by. The gentle hum experience when you sit inside your car and turn on your engine. All these vibrations at various frequencies range infrasonic, audible and ultrasonic ranges. These vibrations are both a boon and a bane and it is critical for us to understand the vibration patterns to ensure they are a boon rather than a bane. Voice and other auditory vibrations that generate music are pleasant to our ears whereas airplane engine noise is bad vibration.

“Vibrations at all frequencies have a significant impact on us, our machines and our surroundings. Many of them have a negative impact which needs to be measured and corrected either during the design phase of the machine or during running phase by means of periodic maintenance.” In many instances, the vibrations created due to daily usage of multiple types of machinery, for e.g., machines in the production line for manufacturing auto components run 24/7 and it is bound to have failures or downtime due to vibration. In such instances, it becomes necessary to reduce to downtime since it causes significant losses to the company by means of preventive maintenance. This ensures the machine’s life expectancy, as well as productivity, is high and more importantly, the safety of people working with these machines is also taken care of.

“Preventive maintenance requires routine condition monitoring systems take vibration measurements at key points and they are analysed for vibration daily to understand any deviation from normal behaviour. Since many of these machines cannot be moved, handheld vibration measuring devices become necessary to measure their worthiness of operation. Most machines have a combination of motors, bearings, shafts and gears that have a varied set of issues like unbalance, misalignment, bearing defects, mechanical looseness, etc. and can be addressed by taking sound and vibration measurements at specific points in and around the machine. It is during these daily multi-point measurements on multiple machines that handheld and portable vibration analysers become critical for continued normal functioning on industries, especially manufacturing, automotive and services.”