Belt-driven rotating equipment is commonly found in all types of facilities. Typical applications include rolls, fans, motors, shafts, and blowers. It is important to maintain that equipment in order to increase its reliability. Maintenance is essential in today’s industrial environment to ensure assets and equipment are running as reliably as they should.

Like any part that can wear over time, belt-driven equipment should be periodically inspected.  This includes the inspection of the pulleys, sheaves, and belts. Worn belts and sheaves should be replaced. Belts should be properly tensioned and the equipment aligned.

It is important to have quantitative values so that the condition of the machine can be evaluated and monitored over time. One way this can be accomplished is through ultrasound and vibration readings. Another value that can be quantified is alignment and belt tension. Belt tension is commonly quantified by force and deflection and determined during the installation of a new belt.

Pulleys and sheaves be should be properly aligned. However, the most common methods rely on pass/fail methods.  This includes straight edge and visual laser guides. While they are better than not performing an alignment check, how does one quantify the degree to which the alignment is accomplished?  In the same way that it is important to quantify shaft alignment, belt alignment should be quantified as well. This supplies numerical information which the reliability engineer can trend and decide the condition of, in order to plan, rather than react to a maintenance operation.

Our Easy-Laser XT190 belt alignment tool can carry out this task and supply numerical values for the current belt alignment condition. A laser transmitter and receiver are placed on the sheaves and pulleys to be aligned. The results are instantaneously projected through the iOS and Android app to supply the current alignment condition in real-time as well as the required corrections. An added benefit is that the users typically only need to access each pulley without having to pull the entire coupling guard off (provided proper lock-out and tag-out procedures are followed). With this advantage, one does not need to visually figure out the alignment as it is all displayed in the app.

The result is that alignments take less time and the reliability engineer can have quantitative data to decide the current and trending alignment condition. This one tool can help move belt-driven rotating equipment from the reactive maintenance stage to the planned and eventually to the precision domain.