Gearmotor Vibration Analysis
NOV needed an application allowing the vibration analysis of a geared motor via the acquisition of acceleration and speed through a CompactDAQ or DAQ USB system integrating an NI 9234 module with the automatic generation of a report. test on Excel.
Phalanx designed a turnkey application combining the advantages of the modularity of the Queue Message Handler (QMH) design model and the state machine in order to perform actions on the acquired data in the desired order (acquisition , raw data recording, data processing, report creation in Excel). Reduce the number of interactions between the software and the operator to make it more intuitive and easy to use, and finally allow a TDMS file to be loaded to re-create its report.
« The modularity offered by LabVIEW makes it easier for us to incorporate functionality into an existing application. This modularity allows the code to evolve over time and thus to consider prospects for the latter » - Aurélien Allaizeau | System Engineer | CLED
An application that guarantees the quality of the products developed by NOV BLM
NOV BLM is a company manufacturing lifting, mooring and mooring equipment for the marine and offshore industry. The Nantes manufacturing plant specializes in jacking systems, mechanisms that allow jack-up oil platforms to be raised and lowered. Following customer feedback on particular noises from their geared motor, NOV BLM decided to develop a new application to generate an Excel vibration analysis report. This analysis is carried out at the end of manufacture of each of their geared motors in order to obtain an identity card. This serves as a basis to guarantee the quality of their geared motor. It also allows the comparison of results spaced over time from the same geared motor.
A first application had been developed in LabVIEW using USB DAQ hardware with an NI 9234 module, but the latter did not generate reports and was not easy to use. The NOV BLM company, based in Carquefou (Loire-Atlantique), therefore decided to call on our company Phalanx, located in the same region.
Software features
Our application developed in LabVIEW allows you to configure the acquisition of accelerations and speeds (frequency and duration of the acquisition), to indicate the configuration of the geared motor analyzed, to save or load these parameters in a * .ini file or from of it (cf. Image 1). All the recorded files are placed in the same folder for each test so that it brings together all the tests carried out and the reports generated on a single geared motor. Four accelerometers are used to obtain speed and acceleration data.
Development time was reduced with the many wave analysis functions offered by the LabVIEW palette, and in our application the most important function was the Fourier transform.
During the development of this application, several versions were delivered. The first did not generate a report but saved the data in TDM format. However, later the recording format changed to TDMS and the NOV BLM company wanted to be able to open the TDM and TDMS files from the software and create the report linked to this data. This is how the last version was enriched with this functionality. The modularity that LabVIEW gives us allows us to quickly add functionality to the program.
Lorsque l’utilisateur accède à la page d’acquisition (cf. image 2), ce dernier a deux choix qui s’offrent à lui : soit charger des données qui proviennent d’un fichier TDM ou TDMS, soit lancer une nouvelle acquisition. Si une nouvelle acquisition est lancée, l’utilisateur doit préciser dans quelle configuration est le motoréducteur. Une fois ceci fait, les étapes se déroulent automatiquement selon les paramètres de l’utilisateur. À la fin de l’acquisition, les données sont présentées dans un graphique d’amplitude/fréquence et le rapport Excel se crée et s’implémente par lui-même des données voulues.
NOV BLM étant une société internationale, ce logiciel peut être utilisé soit en français, soit en anglais.
Generating a report in Excel using a template
Afin de générer un rapport sur Excel, nous sommes partis sur la base de l’utilisation d’un gabarit. Grâce aux fonctionnalités avancées de LabVIEW, il nous a été possible d’ouvrir un fichier Excel qui possédait déjà la mise en forme voulue (tableau, graphique et fonctions), d’en faire une copie et de remplir cette copie à l’aide des données provenant de l’application. Le rapport étant toujours rempli de la même façon d’un motoréducteur à l’autre, ceci nous a permis de diminuer encore une fois le temps de développement, point important pour respecter les délais voulus.
Conclusion and perspectives
Using NI hardware enables data acquisition to be performed in harsh outdoor environments while minimizing the impact of such environments on acquired data. The modularity offered by LabVIEW allows us to incorporate functionality more easily into an existing application. This modularity allows the code to evolve over time and thus to consider prospects for the latter.
Currently, the application cannot perform the acceleration and velocity acquisitions at the same time because the USB DAQ hardware used only implements a single NI 9234 module. In the future, a CompactDAQ system could be used to integrate a second NI 9234 module which would allow the parallel acquisition of speeds and accelerations.
In addition, no windowing is performed on the signals once the Fourier transform is performed. However, the customer's feedback on the functionality of the software enabled us to detect that windowing would be necessary on the acquisition terminals.
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