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Aylesford Newsprint produces some 400,000t of 100% recycled newsprint a year, at its 60 acre site near Maidstone Kent. This is a 24/7 operation, with 120 maintenance staff (from a total work force of 400) divided into area based teams, covering the Fibre Preparation Plant and Utilities.
Each area has a Plant Engineer to control daily maintenance activities and a Maintenance Engineer who deals with longer term issues. The Centralize Workshop handles plant refurbishment, with a Roll Workshop specifically for the regrinding and maintenance of the rolls from the paper machines.
Supporting this is the Maintenance Development Department which includes conditioning monitoring.
The Paper manufacturing process goes through a number of stages starting from FPP, where used newspapers and Magazines are pulped and waste removed. The clean pulp is then passed to the paper machines, where jumbo rolls of newsprint are produced, given a surface finish cut to customer’s requirements and wrapped ready for dispatch. All through the process there is a large amount of rotating equipment which requires vibration monitoring.
“A heavy £250m investment programme though out the 90’s, was the ‘springboard’ for the introduction of new maintenance staff, equipment and ideas” said one of Aylesford’s Reliability Engineers. “Preventive and predictive maintenance are at the heart of our maintenance strategy. Our Conditioning monitoring staff have been trained to carry out vibration monitoring as well as laser alignment, field balancing and thermography.
However it is the older PM (paper machines) that have been the subject of more monitoring investment. New Health & Safety Regulations have been introduced requiring the fitting of distance machine guards, making it impossible to get close enough to monitor vibration using off tour techniques. The company has therefore invested heavily in applying monitran accelerometers, to provide effective vibration and shock monitoring on machinery that must be constantly guarded. They have fitted the MTN/1100SM8 low profile accelerometer, developed for use in limited space applications, and used in conjunction with Monitran’s MTN/3000 series switching units.
If there was any initial scepticism, among management or technicians regarding the value of Condition Monitoring, the Reliability Team feels it has now been overcome. Every month they report to the management on the number predicted faults, any unpredicted faults and why they have occurred. There is also a report on a weekly basis to each area, to catch problems at very early stage and there is a daily engineering meeting where problems can be discussed. “Everyone can see how machine availability is improving” they say.
