Keeping the wheels turning
January 1st 2006

IP&E visited Sensonics to find out what this UK company is doing in the never ending battle to keep the wheels of industry turning

Founded in 1978 Sensonics has more than 25 years experience in the design, manufacture and installation of condition monitoring equipment. The company is somewhat unusual in the fact that it still relies on all UK manufacturing - albeit where as it used to run its own machine shop it now subcontracts out this work and all its PCB building requirements.

"Operating in the modern way" as managing director, Russell King says.

The company offers the following products and competencies: turbine supervisory systems; condition monitoring solutions and products; accelerometers, displacement and seismic transducers; nuclear infrastructure protection and structural monitoring solutions.

For a small company it was pleasing to see that Sensonics had a very healthy attitude to self-investment. The company's turnover is around £2 million and of this 5% is invested back into R&D. The company has also recently purchased a £40 000 laser welding machine and has its own, well equipped, in-house testing and calibration department.

Seismic proportions

An area of the company's business that I had no appreciation of prior to the visit was how involved it is in seismic monitoring.

Russell points to the EU legislation that controls the level of vibration 'allowed' in all kinds of building and construction projects.

As with its condition monitoring business, Sensonics designs, manufactures, installs and supports many of these types of projects. Indeed Russell claims that the company is "The leading supplier of seismic monitoring and protection systems to the UK nuclear industry".

Bespoke solutions

As well as making standard products such as its vibration transducers and the Vibcheck, pocket sized vibration meter what really sets Sensonics apart is its engineering capability and willingness to get involved in bespoke projects. As Jason Kingdom, sales office manager says "We do have the volume lines but we see ourselves as very much at the customised solution end. When you have given up on everybody else we can design a solution for whatever it is you want to monitor".

Sensonics also prides itself on the support that it offers its customers, claiming that it supports projects for much longer than its competitors "We are still supporting projects from 1980s" emphasised Jason Kingdom.

A powerful case A recent example where Sensonic's abilities were tested was during a project at Kingsnorth Power Station. Kingsnorth was already using condition monitoring equipment (see tech spec) from the company to monitor four turbines but wanted to add an additional high vibration trip system in addition to these measurements.

A main driver for this additional system was as insurance. Peak demand power stations can lose £100 000 per hour if they are not available when required and as Russell King says "You can knock a million pounds off your insurance bill if you install safety equipment."

The solution was to implement a tripping algorithm to ensure the generation of systems under various alarm conditions. To ensure robustness of the overall tripping system it was approached from a redundancy point of view, implemented in hardwired logic. The logic functionality was duplicated three times and the parallel processing of the vibration alarm was data voted upon (two of three) to prevent spurious tripping.

The entire installation took just four months for Sensonics to design and install, despite there being a need to get the system SIL (Safety Integrity Level) certified.

Russell King comments on the application saying "Despite this system having the most complicated logic algorithm that we have ever implemented it also demonstrates many of Sensonics strengths. A short time to market, a totally customised solution and meeting the SIL rating".

Maintec 2006

Visiting Sensonics was revealing as to how a small UK engineering company can thrive in the modern industrial environment.

By being flexible for their customers and very organised internally, while investing a good sum in R&D they keep moving forwards.

If you have a condition monitoring issue that you think Sensonics could solve I advise you to seek them out at Maintec 2006 and discuss your application.

Technical Specification:

• Bearing Pedestal Vibration - Accelerometer with Sentry 8601 signal processing and protection module
• Shaft Eccentricity - Proximity probe against shaft with Sentry 8602 signal processing and protection module
• Thrust Movement - Proximity probe against collar with Sentry 8603 signal processing and protection module
• Shaft Expansion - Proximity probe against mark-space plates with Sentry 8612 differential expansion processing and protection module
• Casing Expansion - LVDT between case and pedestal with Sentry 8609 signal processing and protection module
• Speed - Proximity probe against a toothed wheel with Sentry 8608 signal processing and protection module

More articles from Sensonics Ltd: