New Products: RECON Helps D-R Clients
Dresser-Rand has established RECON, a performance and condition monitoring solution to keep rotating equipment operating at peak efficiency. RECON's knowledge-based system helps clients make decisions about operation, maintenance, upgrades and outages for lower ownership costs and increased profits.
RECON integrates all condition monitoring technologies and services provided by D-R, and decades of OEM engineering experience. Among them are RECON Equipment Monitoring Services, an advanced system for collecting, analyzing, diagnosing and reporting information from remote equipment. These technologies are particularly important to owners and operators of equipment in locations not easily accessible to experts, or where on-site personnel may not have the expertise to identify equipment problems in a timely manner. In such cases, RECON is designed to help prevent costly downtime and increase the availability of critical equipment. "With RECON, we provide our clients with the ability to make critical decisions based on comprehensive, reliable information, not just bits of data," said Roderic Gunn, manager of business development, D-R Condition Monitoring. D-R Condition Monitoring targets the company's traditional client base such as equipment owners and operators in the oil, gas, chemical and petrochemical industries as primary clients for RECON. The technology also may be applied to other OEM equipment. "In the past, the maintenance of rotating equipment was largely preventive," Gunn explained. "Bearings would be changed after a specified number of hours of operation because that was the routine. Even traditional condition monitoring wasn't capable of handling a problem until it was well developed. With RECON, it's different. RECON is a predictive, more proactive, maintenance program that allows us to detect mechanical anomalies and potential performance problems well ahead of time, assuring optimal run time." D-R offers a suite of condition monitoring solutions to meet various client requirements based on stand-alone versus remote monitoring, and machinery types. Clients can view their equipment operation information and perform in-depth vibration analysis from anywhere in the world, and D-R can access the necessary data from distant locations specified by the client. RECON Equipment Monitoring Service provides remote, expert analysis and diagnostics through a D-R monitoring center based in Houston, with further access to more than 1,600 D-R engineers. Eventually, all RECON data will be fed from installations around the world to the new Dresser-Rand state-of-the-art monitoring center in Houston.