Vibration Monitoring

How does vibration monitoring work?

Vibration monitoring works by capturing and analyzing the unique vibration signature of a machine. Sensors are strategically placed on key components to establish a baseline, then continuously track changes in amplitude, frequency, and intensity. Deviations from the baseline can signal wear, imbalance, misalignment, or potential failure, triggering timely maintenance before serious issues arise.

As a cornerstone of predictive maintenance, continuous vibration monitoring helps forecast failures with accuracy that depends on the quality and capabilities of the monitoring system in use.

SMARTdiagnostics vibration monitor shown on location, sending reliable data through environmental difficulties like the dirt and rust around it.

Vibration monitoring applications

Widely used across critical industries such as oil and gas, forestry, automotive manufacturing, mining, power generation, and metals production.
Vibration monitoring is ideal for assets like compressors, fans, pumps, presses, and conveyors.
Fans are mission-critical across sectors for cooling, filtration, combustion, and airflow.
Common issues like loose belts, misalignment, or bearing wear can go undetected until failure occurs. Vibration monitoring identifies subtle signature changes early, preventing costly downtime that can reach tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour.
In automotive plants, press crowns are among the most vital and vulnerable assets.
Their central role in stamping operations makes them difficult to access and expensive to repair. Remote vibration monitoring reduces risk, saves technician time, and delivers reliable data to avoid catastrophic failure.
Pumps are another major cost center for manufacturers.
With most pumps running at only 40% efficiency, faults like cavitation, misalignment, overloading, or poor VFD programming can go unnoticed. Vibration monitoring detects these early, reducing energy costs and improving reliability across systems.

Increasing efficiency on just one 200HP fan can save tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Vibration monitoring systems can be either wired or wireless, each with distinct advantages and tradeoffs. While older or low-quality wireless sensors often struggled with reliability, modern Industry 4.0 wireless sensors offer near-continuous, full-spectrum data transmission over robust, industrial-grade wireless networks. Today’s top wireless vibration sensors are easy to install, offer flexible configurations, deliver highly accurate analytics, and are engineered for low power consumption and durability in harsh environments.

Before wireless technology matured, wired vibration monitoring was the preferred choice. Though wired systems are generally less prone to connectivity issues, they come with significant drawbacks—primarily in installation complexity and cost.

Each sensor must be individually connected to a central system via shielded cabling, which often requires conduit and protective measures. This makes scaling difficult and rearranging sensors prohibitively expensive in both time and resources.

Many manufacturers will need some combination of wired and wireless vibration sensors to enable comprehensive condition monitoring in the most cost- and resource-effective way possible. Assets in shielded areas, such as those covered by metal or screening, may be poor candidates for wireless sensors that could struggle to connect to the network. Other machines may operate at high temperatures which could compromise the batteries on wireless sensors.

Wired vibration monitoring hardware can limit manufacturers to sub-optimal sensor arrangements.

Vibration monitoring for complex assets

Advanced remote vibration monitoring hardware can collect simultaneous data samples from several critical components of a given machine and transmit them wirelessly to a base station, enabling consistent measurement for triggered assets. Key metrics like variations in cycle time and vibrational changes during load cycles can be accurately captured and analyzed, letting operations teams monitor even the most complex assets securely and remotely.

KCF technician installs remote vibration monitoring on equipment.

Gang saws

Gang saws operate at high speeds but are only under load during cutting, making it difficult to capture reliable vibration data. The constant loading and unloading of the motor—combined with frequent misalignment of the rotating saw blades—puts extreme stress on components. Without proactive monitoring, mechanical damage is inevitable. For some manufacturers, this results in over $2 million annually in downtime and repairs.

Right angle transfers (RATs)

RAT systems move parts 90 degrees within automotive plant conveyors. When they fail, production can grind to a halt—costing up to $1 million per hour. These systems are often custom-built and made up of non-standard, evolving parts like belts, gears, and pinion drives. Their intermittent motion makes faults hard to detect with traditional wireless vibration measurement devices, which may struggle to capture meaningful data without continuous operation.

SMARTdiagnostics remote vib monitor securely mounted to industrial machinery.

How to use vibration monitoring data

Collecting data by monitoring vibration is just one part of condition monitoring, and just the first step in developing a predictive maintenance model or a more holistic machine optimization strategy. Data from each vibration monitoring sensor must be securely transmitted to an IoT platform that gathers all asset health data across the plant. The data must then be cleaned and contextualized, and advanced analytics applied to reveal actionable insights about machine health.

Many manufacturers who implement vibration monitoring turn to a patchwork solution that relies on multiple vendors to incorporate various types of sensor data and pull them all together in a way that can be interpreted and acted on by maintenance teams. However, integrated machine health monitoring solutions are available, and can help maximize the ROI of your vibration monitoring investment.

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Manufacturers no longer need to rely on patchwork equipment vibration monitoring solutions.

Moving beyond vibration monitoring to machine health optimization

Tracking changes in vibration signatures is a valuable tool for detecting inefficiencies and preventing costly machine failures, but it only scratches the surface. While it may improve plant efficiency, it doesn’t always address the root cause of recurring asset issues.

Machine health optimization goes beyond predictive maintenance. While predictive tools tell you when a failure might occur, optimization strategies reveal why those failures happen in the first place—and how to eliminate the conditions that cause them. With deeper analytics and actionable machine health intelligence, forward-thinking manufacturers can move from reactive fixes to proactive performance, solving problems at their source for good.

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