Predictive Maintenance using Vibration Analysis

By
Mohd Fadli Bin Fadzir
A0134791 EOL Equipment Engineering
Abstract

INTRODUCTION TO VIBRATION FOR

PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE

Wafer sawing machine always contribute to wafer

crack during sawing process. Such crack has made
significant loss in term of money and yield loss.

Vibration is the motion of a part back and forth from

its position of rest. By applying a force to the mass,
the mass moving and compressing the spring. When
the mass is released, it moves back to its neutral
position and then travels further right until the spring
tension stops the mass. This motion is called
vibration.

There are many effort done on reducing mechanical

induces crack by engineers. However endless design
and experiment make no point if no spare part
changes. This paper will study how to reduce
mechanical induced crack by predictive maintenance.

In discussing vibration velocity, the velocity of the

mass approaches zero at extreme limits of travel. Each
time it comes to a stop at the limit of travel, it must
accelerate to increase velocity to travel to the opposite
limit. Acceleration is defined as the rate of change in
velocity.

The predictive maintenance technique is using

vibration analysis and monitoring. The vibration
monitoring system will help to trigger spare parts
change before the parts failure.
The paper basically will discuss vibration as key to
predictive maintenance and how the system will help
to improve machine performance and reduce quality
issue such as blade breakage issue.

Acceleration is normally expressed in g, which is the

acceleration produced by the force of gravity at the
surface of the earth. The value of g is 9.80665 m/s2.
Vibration analysis is a key to predictive maintenance
technique. It is used to determine the operating and
mechanical condition of equipment and identify
developing problems before they become too serious
and cause unscheduled downtime.

INTRODUCTION TO PREDICTIVE
MAINTENANCE
Preventive maintenance is a set of activities that are
performed on plant equipment, machinery, and
systems before the occurrence of a failure in order to
protect them and to prevent or eliminate any
degradation in their operating conditions.

Operators and technicians often detect unusual noises

or vibrations on the manufacturing floor where they
work on a daily basis. In order to determine if a
serious problem actually exists, they could proceed
with a vibration analysis.

No maintenance at all is called breakdown

maintenance. Equipment is simply operate until it
breakdown. This type of maintenance giving lot of
problems to the company as it will require more
extensive repair and affect production downtime.
To overcome the loss of downtime and cost reduction,
we need to have a predictive maintenance. We predict
part failure before its time. Predictive maintenance is
basically a condition driven preventive maintenance.
Predictive maintenance techniques actually have a
very close analogy to medical diagnostic techniques.
Whenever a machine has a problem, it exhibits a
symptom.

Regular vibration monitoring can detect deteriorating

or defective bearings, mechanical looseness and worn
or broken gears. By monitoring vibration levels we
can identify poor maintenance practices. This will
automatically help better installations and repairs
during preventive maintenance job.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Blade breakage has become quality measurement for
wafer sawing process. As blade price as very
expensive, the need for reducing the rate or trend is
very crucial. By reducing blade breakage, we can
saves a lots of money and improve production uptime.

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Figures 1 below show reduction of breakage in year

2015.
Historically breakage rates had settled down from
year to year. Blade breakage data are collected on a
daily basis by equipment engineer. Data was analyzed
and plotted in months and also by machines as below.
We can see significant drop of blade breakage.

improving our spare stock control and monitoring the

condition of parts before its fail.
Typical machine spare parts include motors and
pumps having its own type of monitoring reading.
Fault diagnostic can be developed by monitoring
reading of machine at earlier stages. Reading such as
current, voltage, speed, temperature can be monitor
for any abnormality.
In this paper, the project is focusing on vibration
performance of spare parts over specific period of
time. We will study the amplitude of vibration in the
meantime of spare part failures.
METHODOLOGY
The project is carried out in QFN EOL department on
Accretech machine technology. Vibration sensor or
accelerometer is put near the spindle shaft mounting
of TSK machine.

Figure 1 : Blade Breakage Trend 2015

As the measurements are to be taken in horizontal and

vertical, 2/3 axis accelerometer is used. The
accelerometer gives a voltage reading that
corresponds to the level of vibration.

The most obvious way to look at the data is machine

Pareto in figure 2 below. Blade breakage has been
found to be strongly determined by specific machine.
It is clear from the Pareto study that a few machines
are responsible for the majority of the breakage.

An Analog to digital converter is then used to digitize

the sensor reading data to controller. Controller then
save the sensor reading and save to data logger. The
monitoring system provide trigger if vibration exceed
warning level.
The accelerometer we are using has a 1023mV=g
sensitivity which means that for every 1023mV
change in the voltage reading there is a 1g change in
the acceleration of the object being sensed.
The controller that we use is raspberry Pi. Raspberry
Pi 2 model B is proven to be fast and cheap. It is use
for data logging and signal processing.

Figure 2 : Machine Pareto for Blade Breakage

External Analog to Digital converter used to convert

accelerometer analog signal is MCP3008. It has 8
channels that are adequate for sensor monitoring up to
8 devices.

The highest breakage rate is from TS5D01.This trend

can be reduced by implementing predictive
maintenance using vibration monitoring technique .

SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
PROBLEM OBJECTIVE

The complete signal and hardware block diagrams can

be seen as below in figure 3.

The main objective of predictive maintenance is to

maximize production at lowest cost and highest
quality. We can reduce our machine breakdown by

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Figure 4 : Python program for reading signal

processing
HARDWARE IMPLEMENTATION
Hardware consist of 3 main parts include MCP3008,
Tinkerkit Accelerometer and Raspberry Pi 2 model B.
As you can see below raspberry Pi having PC based
system like. Raspberry Pi have all accessories
keyboard, mouse and monitor but in small size as
shown in figure 5.

Figure 3 : Vibration Monitoring Block Diagram

The whole system is composed of three parts, the
accelerometer to sense the vibration. The ADC to
convert analog to digital data and it is connected to
raspberry Pi through SPI bus. Raspberry Pi will act as
controller for data logging and signal processing.
The approach of this project was divided into two
major parts including software development and
hardware implementation.
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
Software for the overall system is using Raspbian OS
and programming in Python. Part of the reason I
chose the python program was the existing libraries
for SPI library and plotting the vibration graph.

Figure 5 : Raspberry Pi PC based controller

The heart of the vibration monitoring system is the
Raspberry Pi 2 model B single-board computer.
Raspberry Pi board has many devices on board as
shown in figure 6. The board handles interfacing with
sensors and saves reading to data logger. The
accelerometer is attached to the GPIO pins of the
Raspberry Pi via SPI data bus.

Python program will execute main program that will

initialize the SPI bus and reading the accelerometer in
ADC step voltage. The program will read the
accelerometer changes in step voltage and convert to
actual voltages that have been converted by the ADC
as shown in figure 4.
Data logging works by storing the sensor reading and
time stamps into text files. Existing graph plotting
library was use to plot the vibration readings.

Figure 6 : Raspberry Pi 2 model B board

Standard interfaces such as SPI, I2C and UART are
available in simple version, which allows the
extension of hardware such as ADC and

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accelerometer sensors. All function listed according to

GPIO pin as figure 7 below.

Figure 7 : Raspberry Pi GPIO pin map

The raspberry Pi does not come with hardware Analog
to Digital converter. We have to use external ADC
such as MCP3008 for reading the analog inputs
accelerometer. We do it by wiring up MCP3008 to SPI
bus in raspberry Pi. It has 8 analog inputs for
attaching 8 sensors reading and has four digital SPI
data pin as shown in figure 8.

MCP3008 DGND -> GND

The accelerometer was connected to the Raspberry Pi

via the SPI interface as shown in figure 9. It is
composed of a MEMS accelerometer with 2 axis
reading. This module outputs 0V to 3V on one of its
two signal pins when its G force is changed or
moving. The value is approximately 1.5V when there
is 0G on the X or Y axis. We can expect to read values
between 0 and 1023 while moving the sensor. It has
two signal amplifier and a green LED that signals that
the module is correctly powered. The module is based
on the LIS344AL by STMicroelectronics, and is a
three-axis accelerometer.

Figure 9 : Tinketkit 2/3 axis Accelerometer

On the machine side, the accelerometer was mounting
to both spindle body as shown in figure 10. This is
quite challenging as the spindle is exposed to water.
We need to make waterproof cover to protect
electronic accelerometer from water damage. Future
plan is to use Loctite glue to make waterproof cover.
For this project, we install the accelerometer to TSK
machine SSR23.
Figure 8 : MCP3008 Analog to Digital Converter
Below is a wiring diagram. We need to connect the
following pins for the MCP chip
MCP3008 VDD -> 3.3V
MCP3008 VREF -> 3.3V
MCP3008 AGND -> GND
MCP3008 CLK -> SCLK
MCP3008 DOUT -> MISO
MCP3008 DIN -> MOSI
MCP3008 CS -> SPI CE0

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Figure 12 : Y-Axis Accelerometer ADC readings in

mV
The setting of alarm limits and warning limit can be
plot easily using vibration reading trend. From figure
13 below we can see combination reading of both axis
X and Y axis of the accelerometer.
For TSK SSR23, the limit can be set above 900 for
alarm triggering. For warning signal we can set at 800
and above.

Figure 10 : Vibration sensor put to Spindle Mounting

RESULTS
By analyzing the continuous trends of vibration
amplitude the fault symptom can be detected early.
The signatures are collected on regular basis so that
the trending can be compared.
From figure 11 below we can see accelerometer
reading for X-axis. When the machine is idle, the
vibration stay around 750.

We can see the amplitude of the vibration following

spindle vibration. This indicates the performance or
quality of the spindle. An increase in the vibration
amplitude is a direct result of worn out spindle.
With this vibration monitoring on vibration levels
over time period allows the equipment engineer to
predict problems and shut down a machine before it
seriously damages itself and send for repair. Since the
possible problem is discovered
early, the equipment engineer can schedule the
downtime and maintenance in a cost effective manner.

Figure 11 : X-Axis Accelerometer ADC readings in

mV
From figure 12 below we can see accelerometer
reading for Y-axis. When machine start to move
spindle, the vibration increases to 800.

SUMMARY
Vibration analysis is an important measurement tool
used to identify, predict, and prevent failures in
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machines. Implementing vibration analysis as a

condition monitoring tool on the machines will
improve the reliability of the machines and lead to
better machine efficiency and reduced down time
eliminating mechanical or electrical failures.

The ability of continuous vibration monitoring to

provide early detection of potential spare part failure
and allows users to plan maintenance work in
advance. Thus lowers plant operating costs and boost
operation performance.

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