Summary: High resolution mobile phones with slow-motion recording capability provide an amazing resource for reliability professionals. We’ve already seen slow-motion mobile phone camera’s used in place of strobe lights to visualize and identify common faults like broken keyway’s, material build up on fans and more.

In this case study we will explore and evaluate the effectiveness of utilizing mobile phone video recordings for vibration analysis of rotating equipment to identify common machine health faults that previously required the use of hard-wired sensor technology in a non-contact method video post processing method.

Several different examples will be used to clearly identify misalignment, imbalance, looseness, phase related issues, and more.

Learning Objective: Understand the power of mobile phone camera technology available to nearly every reliability professional as they already have the phone available as a tool.

Learning Takeaways:

• Understand how camera frame rate relates to fmax
• Understand how camera resolution impacts sample resolution for analysis
• Understand how lighting impacts post processing
• Best practices for mobile phone non-contact vibration analysis