ISO 17359: Condition Monitoring and Diagnostics of Machines — General Guidelines

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Dynamic balancer “Balanset-1A” OEM

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ISO 17359 is the high-level “umbrella” standard for the entire field of machinery condition monitoring. Rather than prescribing a single measurement technique, it lays out a strategic framework — a roadmap — for setting up and running a monitoring programme from first planning through to routine operation and review. It is deliberately technology-agnostic: it tells you how and why to build a programme, then points to the more specific standards that govern each individual technology, such as ISO 13373-1 for vibration analysis, oil analysis for tribology, and infrared thermography for thermal surveys. In short, ISO 17359 is the starting point that ties the whole discipline together.

1. The Role of an Umbrella Standard

Most condition-monitoring standards answer narrow questions: which sensor, which frequency range, which alarm chart. ISO 17359 answers the prior, more strategic question — what should the programme as a whole look like, and how do its parts fit together? It supplies the business and engineering logic that justifies the investment and keeps the effort focused on the machines that matter.

Two ideas underpin the whole approach. The first is detecting a developing fault early enough to act: ISO 17359 frames this as the lead time to failure — the interval between when a defect first becomes detectable and when the machine can no longer do its job — the same idea known more generally as the P-F interval in reliability-centred maintenance. The whole point of condition-based maintenance is to detect the fault within that window and act before functional failure arrives, converting an unplanned breakdown into a planned, proactive repair. The second idea is integration: data from several technologies — vibration, oil, thermography, motor-current analysis — can be combined to reach a more confident diagnosis than any single method gives alone.

2. The Six-Step Cyclical Process

ISO 17359 lays out the programme as a continuous cycle — presented here as six core steps — in which the output of the final step feeds back into the first, creating a process of continuous improvement.

Step 1 — Machine Knowledge and Information (the Audit)

This foundational step is the strategic core of the entire programme. It mandates a thorough audit to identify which machines are most important to the operation and therefore warrant monitoring — a criticality and risk analysis that ranks assets by the consequence of their failure. Once the critical machines are identified, the standard requires gathering all pertinent information: design specifications, operating parameters, maintenance history, and — most importantly — a detailed Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA).

The FMEA is a systematic method for identifying every way a machine or its components can fail. For each failure mode — say “bearing spalling” or “shaft unbalance” — the team works out the likely causes, the symptoms or effects it produces (for example “generates high-frequency impacts” or “causes high 1X vibration”), and the consequences of the failure. The output is a definitive list of credible failure modes for each critical machine, and that list drives every later step.

Step 2 — Select the Monitoring Strategy

This step builds directly on the FMEA. For each identified failure mode, the team chooses the most effective and economical technology to detect its onset; there is deliberately no one-size-fits-all answer. If the FMEA shows that a gearbox’s dominant failure mode is tooth wear, the strategy might be wear-particle oil analysis, which can flag debris long before the vibration signature changes. For shaft misalignment, the obvious choice is vibration analysis, because it reads the characteristic 2X signature directly. The activity here is to review every available CBM technology and map each one onto the specific symptoms the FMEA predicted, producing a targeted, efficient plan.

Step 3 — Establish the Monitoring Programme

This is the tactical planning phase, where the strategy from Step 2 becomes a documented action plan. It defines the precise measurement locations on each machine, the exact parameters to be recorded (RMS velocity, peak acceleration, temperature, wear-particle concentration), the data-collection frequency (monthly for less critical assets, continuously for the most critical), and the initial alarm or alert limits. The standard offers three sound ways to set those first alarm levels: generic severity charts such as ISO 10816 / ISO 7919 (now consolidated as ISO 20816), the equipment vendor’s recommendations, or a percentage change from a healthy baseline reading. The result is a complete, written monitoring plan for every machine.

Step 4 — Data Acquisition

This step is the routine, physical execution of the plan: dispatching a technician or an automated system to collect the specified data at the prescribed interval. The standard places heavy emphasis on standardised procedures so that data stays consistent and repeatable from visit to visit. That means following the detailed method for the chosen technology — for vibration, adhering to ISO 13373-1 — and ensuring the machine runs under comparable conditions (same load and speed) each time, with every record correctly stored and labelled with date, time, machine ID and measurement-point ID for reliable trending.

Step 5 — Data Analysis and Diagnostics

Here the raw data becomes information. Analysis comes first: the new reading is compared against the alarm limits set in Step 3. If nothing is breached, the machine is confirmed healthy. If an alarm trips, the work moves on to diagnostics — a deeper investigation by a trained analyst to find the root cause. That might mean studying the specific frequencies and patterns in a vibration spectrum, or examining the size and shape of particles in an oil sample. The standard recommends a systematic approach: correlate the observed pattern with the failure modes catalogued in the Step 1 FMEA to arrive at a specific, confident diagnosis.

Step 6 — Maintenance Decision and Action

The final, decisive step turns the diagnosis into action — though “repair immediately” is only one of several options. The decision is a risk-based judgement weighing the severity of the fault, the criticality of the machine and the resources available. The response might be as light as simply increasing the monitoring frequency, or as planned as scheduling a specific correction (an alignment job, a bearing change) for the next outage, or as drastic as recommending an immediate shutdown to head off catastrophic failure. Once the work is done and the fault verified as cleared, the result is fed back into the machine’s history (Step 1), closing the loop and improving the next cycle.

3. Where Vibration Analysis Fits — and the Balanset-1A

Although ISO 17359 is technology-neutral, vibration is by far the most common monitoring channel because it sees so many failure modes at once — unbalance, misalignment, looseness, bearing defects and gear defects all leave distinct frequency fingerprints. Step 4 of the cycle requires a portable, repeatable way to capture that data in the field. A two-channel instrument such as the Balanset-1A covers two roles in one tool: it acquires the FFT spectrum and overall vibration levels needed for the Step 5 comparison against ISO 20816 limits, and — when the diagnosis points to unbalance — it performs the corrective field balancing in the machine’s own bearings without sending the rotor away. That ability to move straight from detection to correction is exactly the kind of efficient, closed-loop workflow the standard is designed to encourage.

4. Key Concepts to Remember

• Strategic framework, not a measurement recipe: the standard is about the “how” and “why” of building a programme, supplying the engineering and business logic behind condition monitoring rather than telling you to “measure RMS velocity.”
• Technology-agnostic: the same framework applies whether the programme rests on vibration, oil analysis, infrared thermography, acoustic emission or motor-circuit analysis.
• Lead time to failure: a developing fault can be caught well before functional failure, enabling planned, proactive maintenance instead of reactive repair.
• Integration: combining data from several technologies yields a more confident and accurate picture of machine health than any single channel.
• Continuous improvement: the six-step loop feeds verified outcomes back into machine history, so the programme learns and sharpens over time.

5. How ISO 17359 Relates to Its Companion Standards

ISO 17359 sits at the top of a family of documents and is most useful when read as the entry point to them. It hands off to ISO 13373-1 for the detailed mechanics of vibration data collection, to ISO 13374 for data processing and communication architecture, and to severity standards such as ISO 20816-3 when absolute vibration limits are needed for the Step 5 evaluation. Personnel competence is governed separately by ISO 18436-2, which sets the qualification categories for the analysts who carry out Steps 5 and 6. Reading ISO 17359 first makes the rest of the suite far easier to navigate, because it explains where each detailed standard plugs into the overall cycle. The complete official text is published by ISO as standard reference 71194 and can be purchased from the ISO store for organisations that need the full normative wording.

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