Development of low cost instrumentation to monitor coasting-down time of rotating shaft

The condition monitoring technique of coast-down time is non-invasive and has significant potential for assessing the real time health of rotating equipment, particularly ones having inaccessible bearing surfaces. Literature study shows that little research has been carried out in refining this technique. One possible reason maybe the high cost of instrumentation required to acquire the shaft speed as a function of time in time intervals of the order of, say, 40 ms. This paper discusses the development of a low cost on-line instrumentation to achieve this objective. It is envisaged that, the availability of such affordable instrumentation may give the much needed thrust to researchers for further refinement of this technique.