Corbin Belknap with Regal Rexnord

Corbin Belknap Rexnord

Mon, Oct 23, 2023 10:40AM • 15:15

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

torque, corbin, shaft, monitoring, industrial, industry, coupling, world, conference, put, years, wireless sensors, gearbox, 31st annual, customer, data, running, transmission, cracks, train

SPEAKERS

Scott MacKenzie

00:03

Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go

00:21

Alright, once again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk a platform dedicated to industry professionals all around the world, you're bold, brave, you dare greatly you innovate, you solve problems you make the world a better place. We are broadcasting on site smrp here in Orlando, Florida, it is the 31st annual smrp conference, and it is probably the biggest one yet. That's what they're saying. And I am not going to call them out on the carpet on that one because it is buzzy buzzy out there. And if you're in the world of asset management, or if you want to be in the world of asset management or maintenance, or reliability, you need to be a member of smrp. So go out to smrp.org Find out more get engaged. It is a must. That's like number one numero uno. And then you get to connect with people like Corbett who's in the hot seat. He's going to be talking about torque monitoring. That just sounds cool. Sounds sounds manly. You bet. All right,

01:22

let's get cracking is what everyone wants to hear about.

01:25

I know I do. So there's one person. And there's a lot more. So you having a good

01:30

conference? Yeah, absolutely. First time being here. So yeah.

01:34

Are you an smrp? Member?

01:36

No, I'm not. No, no, this first first time I was called to come to this conference. So I will from next year. It's been great so far. Yeah.

01:45

You need to be you need to go on to smrp.org and become a member.

01:49

Right after this. I'll do that. Absolutely.

01:52

He's not a member. Yeah, you take a picture. He's not a member. Yeah. Oh, no, it's common. Yeah, it's your fan club. Perfect. One fan. I have one fan.

02:04

I thought it was one mom. But no, I've got Carmen too.

02:09

So anyway, so you have a good conference, we're going to be covering a number of smrp. There they are right over there right next to us. Give us a little background of 411 on who you are.

02:19

Yeah, so I'm Corbin Belknap cabin in the mechanical power TEK

02:23

is silent. Oh, so don't even think about that. Okay. Yeah, it's

02:27

French or something like that. Yeah. But, but yeah, I've been in the mechanical power transmission world for about 10 years and then joined perceptive. So kind of in the condition monitoring world for about a year, but then previously, and then my last role that I had was I was also really focused on on wireless sensors on you know, motors, bearings, gearboxes, the kind of the whole drive train. And I've been really focused this whole year, mostly on the steel industry. But recently, I've been given a number of Simon's to to branch out as well into a wide number of different industries. So

03:03

to help define pirate power transmission, what is I have, because I'm a transmission lineman, of course, I'm thinking, hey, he's climbing towers. And yeah, and he's doing some of the utility stuff.

03:14

Yeah, so I think like mechanical power transmission, so that would be anything where you've got, like a, say, like an electric motor of bearing gearbox, it's all within the transmissions, that's, that's helping to move, you know, products and industrial space from point A to point B, right? Whether that's, you know, removing grain from point A to point B, or coal, or it's moving packages in a warehouse, Amazon facility or something along those lines. So it's that whole drive train from the electrical side, the motor to the mechanical side, the bearings. Right.

03:48

All right. Talk to us about torque, monetary, what did the heck is that and make it cool?

03:55

Yeah, we'll make it as cool as possible. So, you know, what we do a lot is obviously what a lot of other people do in terms of, you know, wireless vibration, and so on. But we specialize in torque monitoring, right, so that's where we put a string gauge onto a shaft onto a coupling within that drive train. So if you think about like a steel mill, you've got the 6000 horsepower electric motors, we'll put a strain gauge on that shaft or wireless strain gauge, and it will actually let us know what the torque that's actually being transmitted through that shaft is at at any given moment. So you might say, why is that important? Why would you want to know what the torque level is? Because one from a reliability standpoint, because, you know, if you've got a coupling, you've got a gearbox, you've got various components in that drive train, there's certain torque limits that you don't want to exceed right? Because if you're exceeding those on a regular basis, then the chances that those products will fail is greatly increased and downtime could be 10s of 1000s. 1000s Or even get into the hundreds of 1000s of dollars. So we can, you know, provide reports to say, well listen, you for 30 times this week, the way that you're running this particular drive train, you know, it's going to result in failures of what we're predicting, because you're running it too hard. Also, we can measure the, what we call the torsional, natural frequency, everything has a natural frequency. If that's changing, then we know that there might be cracks. It's developing in that coupling or leakages of lubrication. That's a really early indicator that something's going catastrophically wrong, you need to do inspection on that equipment. So you're not going to be losing 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds,

05:44

is it? Is it easy to install this device, and to begin pulling the analytics off of it?

05:52

Yeah, so what we would do is our team installs it. So the perceptive team, so we're going to do that every single time. Because we do need to place the sensor on the shaft. And there is just a essentially a few different little spot welds, that's welding the strain gauge to the shaft itself. So as torque is being transmitted through that shaft, it's actually straining the gauge as well and producing that sort of data. So our team would come in install the string gauge installed, the receiver, obviously, you can't have wires that are being wrapped around the shaft. So it's wireless to a receiver, that that we would then either route into the customer's local system, or what we commonly do is provide weekly reports on torque, and what that actually means for the customer.

06:45

How do you know you're over torquing a shaft? Is it just data out there and just saying, Hey, here's, here's the manufacturer's recommendation of the torque of this thing. And you're, you're blown by it, or you're violating it, or whatever you say?

07:00

Yeah, absolutely. So that's one thing, right? We'll look right, if if if Tane, a spindle or universal joint, it's pretty easy to look at what are the torque limits of that if it's a gearbox, we understand what the torque limits of that are. So that's part of the equation. The other part of that equation is looking at things such as the natural frequency, which would give us even further insight, not just to say that we know that you're exceeding the manufacturer's limits, but we know that something is going wrong here, right? Even if the past three months, you haven't exceeded it, we can sort of tell if cracks are developing and shafting and so on, based off, you know, that data,

07:40

right? But you, you have to have sort of a baseline look, if I, let's say I'm running my shop, and I finally say, Hey, Scott, you've been running the shop for, you know, five years. And then I call you, and you come on out, and you give me that whole torque solution, right. I've already got five years worth of wear and tear and tear in this particular shaft. Yeah. How do you normalize that?

08:08

Yeah. So well, you know, yeah, when we need to develop a baseline over time, in part of the manufacturers data kit can certainly help with that. It's a will, that just actually take some time to develop a correct baseline of where we would go. And that's just through, you know, detailed inspections of the data over a set period of time.

08:34

Yeah, I would have said, I would think that the manufacturer's recommendation is sort of the starting point. And then you can sort of put the product or put the solution in, and then say, Hey, see, it's different now. Right? Yeah. Which is probably the case quite frequently. Yeah.

08:51

And we have a lot of times where, you know, they want more and more production out. Right. So yeah, they're looking for some sort of indication, based off maybe we start with the manufacturers, but then over time, yeah, we can adjust it, maybe it's capable of more, because different manufacturers might have put in different safety factors into the equipment, but they're looking for feedback. Are we babying the plant too much? Or this particular machine? Or can we run it martyrs? Right? Because that happens to where they need to? They need to run more production through that specific facility. And we do it do we need to upgrade the drive? Yeah. Or it's going way beyond the capabilities of of what it is and we need to adjust accordingly. So that happens quite a bit with torque monitoring.

09:39

It's pretty cool. I didn't know that. That's something new.

09:43

It Yeah, it is. So we've really been having a heavy presence with torque monitoring in the metals industry, but, but we've also utilized it quite a bit in a wide number of industries and it's kind of growing, its presence there, even on a short term die. agnostic standpoint, you know, a customer wants to put a different type of coupling in, in a one that has like a torque limiting, coupling and they're not sure what how, what torque level, they want me to place it to be asked to slip, you don't want to place it to where you know, it's going to slip it so low of a torque that it's just going to constantly slip, and then you don't want to put it at a torque limiting coupling at such a high level of torque, as well, where it's essentially not limiting the torque and it can cause damage. So by looking at the torque data that we provide, we can also give a customer an idea of how to properly select equipment if they don't want ongoing, you know, torque monitoring services for you know, two, three, number of years. Right?

10:49

What about what do you see sort of from a future perspective? What do you think's change drastic, quite rapidly around here? How are you seeing your business changing?

11:03

Yeah, I mean, I do feel as though if you kind of, we started to really pioneer this, you know, sort of service when it comes to torque, I do think that's going to have, you know, rapid, rapid growth. I think, you know, in the next four to five years, we're going to start to see a lot of other industries adopt this sort of, of technology. And then there's a lot of customers out there who are really realizing that maybe a reactive maintenance approach, right is certainly costing them a lot of money. And there's a lot of great technologies that are coming on the marketplace. When it comes to wireless sensors, I just think the you know, that's just going to become the standard in the industry going forward that a real realization that you have to have some sort of monitoring or from, you know, a profitability standpoint, it's going to be very difficult to compete. So

11:56

yeah, I think it's a no brainer, I think that organizations, but But I do think there's a bright spot. For many years, a lot of this stuff, for lack of a better term was considered voodoo. And now it's becoming mainstream. And now people are embracing it more and more, whatever, that that whole reliability approach, that asset monitoring approach is becoming definitely more approachable. And I think that if you're an organization, and that organization is you want that organization to be resilient, you can't help but have a digital conversation. You can't help have that monitoring conversation. Right? And finding companies like regal Rexnord is is an example of finding those Sherpas right but being able how do people get a hold of you my friend? Yeah, absolutely.

12:49

I believe we got my business card there but it's best to reach out to me my phone number is 864270806 one's the best you

12:57

active out on LinkedIn. Yes, I

12:59

am. Corbin Belknap.

13:01

Yeah, the K is silent, so don't even go there. BLK na P. Belknap. There it is. You are great. That was so cool. first podcast.

13:12

We'll do this tomorrow. Okay,

13:13

Dom Yeah, you're gone. I for one, I understand. That's, that's what that's all about. All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Thank you very much for joining industrial talk. And we're gonna have all the contact information for Corbin out on industrial talk.com. So reach out and connect with Corbin in a big way. We are broadcasting from SMRP, the conference, the 31st annual SMRP key conference here in Orlando. It is a great event. It has people like Corbin and others who are really focused on solving the challenges of today. And and doing it with a happy heart. How's that corporate

13:51

that's that's I happy. I'm inspired going forward. Yeah.

13:54

All right. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned, we will be right back.

14:00

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

14:09

All right, that was Corbin. Corbin belt nap. Que silent. There's a que en there, Belknap. So reach out to him put that on your bucket list to do because you will not be disappointed. He knows his stuff. That is the company regal Rexnord. So look them up as well go out to their stat card, which will be out on industrial talk. So don't worry about it. Find out more about Corbin and the company because it's important. All right. As you can tell by the noise in the background. We were on site dead center, conference floor and interviewing some of the best in reliability like Corbin you need to be a part of SMRP Go out to smrp.org because, you know if you're in that world of asset management, you know, maintenance, reliability, and everything in between. You need to be connected. You need need to be connected through smrp.org All right we're gonna have more we've just started we just started scratching the surface at SMRP Be bold be brave Daring Greatly hanging out with Corbin and you will be changing the world we're gonna have another great conversation shortly so stay tuned