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MONITRAN HELPS KEEP THE PRESSES ROLLING
With 12 printing presses turning out 14 million newspapers per week, Trinity Mirror’s Watford, England, printing site can ill afford the downtime associated with unexpected mechanical failure. To this end, Trinity Mirror employs the services of Dowding & Mills, a leading independent electrical, mechanical and calibration services group, to monitor the condition of the presses. The installation last year of 468 MTN/1100CQ accelerometers hard-wired to 12 MTN/3000 manual switching units from Monitran Ltd, the vibration and displacement monitoring specialist, has enabled Dowding & Mills to substantially extend its predictive maintenance programme on Trinity Mirror’s printing presses.
Dowding & Mills was initially engaged to undertake manual checks on a monthly basis on four of the 12 presses. However, because much of the equipment to be monitored – such as main press drive motors and gearboxes – was located underneath checker plate floors, the task of collecting data was very time-consuming and also involved Health and Safety issues.
To monitor vibration safely, accurately and effectively, Trinity Mirror made the decision to have Dowding & Mills install permanent accelerometers wired to a series of switching units located in safe, accessible locations. According to Neil Spiers, Branch Manager at Dowding & Mills’ Hemel Hempstead office, “Monitran equipment was chosen as Dowding & Mills as a company has adopted the MTN/1100CQ and other Monitran equipment as an industry standard.”
As the accelerometer/switch box set-up allowed data on the machine performance to be downloaded more easily, man hours spent on data collection could be greatly reduced, and the saved manpower transferred to data analysis and reporting. The streamlined process meant that Dowding & Mills was in a position to collect, analyse and report on data from all 12 presses each month. Trinity Mirror has been so pleased with the performance of the Monitran equipment that it is currently adding another 117 MTN/1100CQ accelerometers to its presses.
Peter Home, Engineering Manager at Trinity Mirror’s Watford site, said, “We were so impressed and confident in the results that we asked Dowding & Mills to install fixed accelerometers to extend the programme so that all 12 presses are monitored on a monthly basis. Information is now gathered much more quickly and safely and when overhaul work needs to be done, we can schedule it at a convenient time.”
