John Crane advances wireless monitoring for sealed systems

London - John Crane has launched what it believes is the first purpose-built wireless technology of its type to remotely measure the pressure, temperature and level of the barrier fluid in a sealed system. The 3in1 Vessel Monitoring System (VMS), it claims, is easier, faster and cheaper to install than traditional hardwired alternatives and offers a rugged and accurate flow of real-time information on the current state of seals and their support systems.

According to the company, the VMS can significantly improve the levels of plant reliability, availability and environmental compliance by allowing maintenance procedures to be tailored to the individual plant. This, it added, will enable seal failures to be better understood for more rapid decision making.

Maintaining a barrier fluid within set limits provides a stable operating environment that helps to maximize seal life, explains John Crane. By monitoring the pressure, temperature and level in the barrier fluid vessel the 3in1 VMS detects early indications of potential seal damage so that preventative measures can be taken before a seal failure occurs or the process fluid becomes contaminated.

Wireless operation, meanwhile, allows the technology to be used where hardwiring is not economic - the system can be installed at less than 20% of the typical cost of an equivalent cabled system. VMS can also be used on seals systems in hazardous and remote locations. The data is transmitted back to a central gateway where it is analysed by specialist software and displayed using easy-to-read graphics.

The VMS also features a traffic light alarming and notification system warns operators of a problem within a plant, enabling them to pinpoint the exact seal system in question, identify the problem and immediately compare this to the record of that system’s previous trended performance which is stored in the 3in1 VMS. The system can be fitted to John Crane standard seal system types 100, 200 & 300 and versions to suit other manufacturer’s seal systems are also available.

The 3in1 VMS sensor nodes are battery operated, with an expected life of five years, and are designed for quick and easy installation. It comes complete with its own software which provides at-a-glance mimic panels, alarming, trending, records of state changes and reporting. It requires very little maintenance and allows up to 75 vessels to be monitored on a site located up to 300 metres away from the gateway receiver in a plant environment, and 1,500 metres line of site.

JCAMS is a business unit of John Crane. Based in the Aberdeen Science Park, JCAMS provides condition monitoring (CM) services and state-of-the-art hardware and software solutions to deliver market leading knowledge-based services for condition based maintenance (CBM), computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and asset management, to improve equipment availability and reliability.