Fluke 810 Case Studies

Fluke 810 Vibration

Tester keeps the

good stuff flowing

Testing Functions

Case Study

At Alpenrose Dairy in Portland, Oregon, operators pro­cess raw milk into a dozen varieties of milk, six cultured
products (cottage cheese and sour cream) and 31 fla­vors of ice cream. It’s a challenge to keep the complex
Alpenrose production facility, with its hundreds of motors,
pumps and gearboxes, running butter-smooth. But
thanks to the new Fluke 810 Vibration Tester, it’s easier
today to maintain Alpenrose as the cream of the crop.

Application Note

Tools: 810 Vibration Tester

Operator: Alpenrose Dairy,

Portland Oregon

Measurements: Vibration diagnostics
on specific motor components

When is vibration
a problem?

Vibration in industrial equipment can be both a
sign and a source of trouble. Other times, vibra­tion just “goes with the territory” as a normal part
of machine operation, and should not cause undue
concern. But how can the plant maintenance
professional tell the difference between accept­able, normal vibration, and the kind of vibration

This isn’t your average dairy.
Family owned and operated since
1916, Alpenrose Dairy, Inc. has
evolved over time into a com­munity entertainment center
that includes Alpenrose Stadium,
Dairyville (a replica of a western
frontier town), a 600-seat opera
house, a Quarter Midget racing
arena and an Olympic-style
bicycle track.

The hub of this high-profile
enterprise is the production
plant, churning out dairy prod­ucts that get to market the day
they leave the farm. Mainte­nance manager Eric Trummel
and maintenance technician
and electric motor expert Todd
Toburen keep their fingers on
the pulse of the plant.

In the US Navy, Toburen
learned vibration analysis to
find and diagnose electric motor
problems. “We would take our

that requires immediate attention to service or
replacement of trouble equipment?

Machines that should not vibrate as part of
normal operation are electric motors, rotary pumps
and compressors, and fans and blowers. In these
devices smoother operation is generally better, and
a machine running with zero vibration is the ideal.

readings and send the data to
Annapolis. Annapolis would com­pile tons of data bouncing off of
different frequencies and give us
a call back to tell us whether it
was good or bad,” Toburen said.
“We would rewind and rebuild
the motor and retest it, just to
make sure what we sent out to
the fleet was a good piece of
equipment.”

Pumps, motors,
gearboxes and more

In his five years at Alpenrose,
Toburen has taken charge of
the hundreds of pumps, motors,
gearboxes, compressors and other
equipment required to operate a
midsize dairy plant.

“We’ve got equipment here
that if it goes down, processing
stops,” he said. “If the bad part is
a high-dollar item we don’t have

F r o m t h e F l u k e D i g i t a l L i b r a r y @ w w w . f l u k e . c o m / l i b r a r y

maintenance professionals who
need to troubleshoot mechanical
problems and quickly understand
the root cause of equipment
condition. It’s programmed to
diagnose the most common
mechanical problems of unbal­ance, looseness, misalignment
and bearing failures in a wide
variety of mechanical equip­ment, including motors, fans,
gearboxes, couplings, pumps,
compressors and more.

The diagnostic technology in

sitting on the shelf, we could be
down for a couple of days.” In
the dairy business, where fresh
products are essential, such an
outage is a non-starter.

To prevent such incidents,
Alpenrose manages a proactive
maintenance program to help
understand when a motor or
machine might encounter prob­lems. “Our biggest concerns are
the pieces of equipment that are
critical to the processes,” he said.
“If we see that there’s deteriora­tion in the bearings or what have
you, we’ll be able to schedule
the downtime to take care of that
problem.”

But accuracy is key. Trum­mel recalls an incident when
a vibration-analysis contrac­tor doing a semiannual check
warned of bearing deterioration
in an important air compres­sor. “He claimed that one of the
bearings had gone bad, and
that we needed to take care of
it in the next couple of months,”
Trummel said. “The next week
the coupling on the compressor
disintegrated. The air compressor
went down, and it represented
a limitation of the plant. That’s
when I realized these guys may
not know what they’re doing.”

the Fluke 810 analyzes machin­ery condition and identifies faults
by comparing vibration data to
an extensive set of rules and
algorithms developed over years
of field experience. The Fluke
810 is not merely a vibration
detector—it’s a complete diagnos­tic and problem-solving solution.

“Using the Fluke, we’re able
to take a reading once a week or
once a month,” said Toburen. “If
we notice something different we
can build a trend analysis with
that data. If we notice there’s a
change in our frequencies, that’s
something we need to look at.
Of course we won’t be able to do
every piece of equipment here
at the dairy every single month.
We’ll prioritize what equipment
we want to check on a monthly
or a quarterly basis, and I’m
basing that on what my baseline
reading is.”

”The diagnosis was
right on”

Machine operators form an
important early warning system.
If a machine doesn’t feel or sound
right to them, Toburen trouble­shoots the equipment with the
Fluke 810 to see exactly what’s
going on. “The nice thing with
this is you’re able to tell, is it the

”It’s good to have this
capability in house”

“This is why this Fluke 810 is
relevant to us,” Trummel con­tinued. “It’s good to have this
capability in house and check
this equipment every couple of
weeks. We get a better idea and
a better feel for what’s going on.”

The handheld Fluke 810

Vibration Tester is designed for

2 Fluke Corporation Fluke 810 Vibration Tester keeps the good stuff flowing

gearbox, is it the compressor, is
it the motor, is it the drive end,
is it the off end—it even breaks
it down to if you have a loose
coupling or not,” he said.

The Fluke 810 also rates the
level of severity of any problems
it finds. “It has four different
levels,” Toburen said. “Green
being slight, yellow being mod­erate, orange being serious and
red being extreme.” But Toburen

said it took some checking to
fully trust the opinions of the
Fluke 810.

“I had to develop a comfort
level with the Fluke’s interpreta­tion,” he said. “I’ve done quite
a bit of that. Somebody would
come up and say they had a real
loud motor. I’d go out and take a
vibration analysis on it, and each
time I’ve done that it’s come back
as ‘extreme.’

“The Fluke will actually give
you ‘loose bearing’ or ‘bear­ing wear’—it will give you the
diagnosis,” he added. “I’ve taken
the motors apart and each time
I’ve done it, the diagnosis was
right on. Then I’d also rebuild the
motor, throw it on the work­bench, put the 810 back on it
and it comes back as either ‘no
problem detected’ or ‘slight wear
or vibration.’”

“I absolutely love it,” he said.
“It’s an absolutely phenomenal
tool.”

And has the Fluke 810 saved
money? “I don’t know,” said
Toburen. “But being able to say
there’s something wrong with
our equipment, troubleshoot that,
get the parts on order, repair it
in our downtime and bring it
back up online—it’s almost price­less. If you don’t have that part
on the shelf it could be two days
out, and you’re not doing any
processing. The amount you can
save? It could be significant.”

Fluke. Keeping your world
up and running.

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Specifications subject to change without notice.
Printed in U.S.A. 10/2010 3672666B AW-EN-N

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