Coupling Credible Failure Modes and Owner Options to Intervene

Abstract

While all machine component failures can impact reliability, cost and production, some like coupling failures may have safety risks for personnel.Intervention requires us to build appropriate steps into our machine and system designs as well as our coupling design, operation and maintenance practices.Vibration instrumentation alone can leave us vulnerable for some failure modes.In this paper, a user's and an OEM's views are presented of the most common coupling failure modes with examples showing details in the final stages of deterioration and identifies options to enable owners to intervene in sufficient time to prevent catastrophic failure.