Vibration analysis is the collection of vibration data from machinery, and interpreting the data to establish the "health" of a piece of equipment.

This provides the ability to determine locations and types of problems inside a piece of equipment, without removing it from service or disassembly.
Some problems that can be detected by this method include:

Many production and process industries that implement preventative maintenance programs, have seen huge budgetary savings per year, as well as decreased outage and downtime.

The money that is saved by planning maintenance to correspond with production scheduling and avoiding excess equipment damage and repair costs after a severe failure is significant.

Example Readings: Scrubber #4:Fan N.D.E. Horizontal IPS

Fan N.D.E. | Velocity (Acc to Vel) (Peak)  | Point Id: Fan N.D.E. Horizontal

Set Id:	Scrubbers	Window:	Hanning	Speed:	685.00 RPM	Overall:	0.165
Date:	10-Mar-06	Lines:	800	Threshold:	0.05	Sync:	0.098
Freq..:	0 - 120000 CPM	Aver:	6	Units:	IPS	SubSync:	0.012
Detect:	Peak	Type:	FFT

This spectrum shows a bearing on a fan that is failing.

Not only can we find and predict bearing failures, we can also determine where the problem is within the bearing. In this case the most wear is on the outer race as indicated by the BPFO harmonics.