We review existing machine condition monitoring techniques and industrial automation for plant-wide condition monitoring of rotating electrical machines. Cost and complexity of a condition monitoring system increase with the number of measurements, so extensive condition monitoring is currently mainly restricted to the situations where the consequences of poor availability, yield or quality are so severe that they clearly justify the investment in monitoring. There are challenges to obtaining plant-wide monitoring that includes even small machines and non-critical applications. One of the major inhibiting factors is the ratio of condition monitoring cost to equipment cost, which is crucial to the acceptance of using monitoring to guide maintenance for a large fleet of electrical machinery. Ongoing developments in sensing, communication and computation for industrial automation may greatly extend the set of machines for which extensive monitoring is viable.
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