At the beginning, many large public sector enterprises in India began their operations between the years 1940 and 1960s. These industries were mainly of machine tools, horology, aeronautical, rail coach building, electrical large machinery and so on. Some of the premier engineering and scientific institutions started just past Indian independence or even earlier. All the industries and institutions started off with their in-grant resources to operate and produce the intents.
While many of these large industries and institutions had their operation set up in place, the supporting resources and the eco-system to keep the equipment up and running were either non-existent or were in their nascent stage. Of them are the machinery / equipment repair and maintenance teams that were the in great demand as the machine down time would result in production losses and would affect the morale of the enterprise. Sending equipment back to their manufacture's / suppliers would be a high cost proposition (also for the reason that most of these were sourced from abroad).
In the absence of any predictive or time based maintenance practices in place, the default way of intervention to service was of a break-down scenario, whose fall-outs are now well known. This forced most companies to adapt in-house maintenance practices that included multi-faceted strategies such as oil and lubrication checks, ferrography, electrical diagnosis of motors and generators, noise and vibration tests and many more. This framework and its associated activities formed the basis of consulting services.
Typical Noise & Vibration services
I worked with a government manufacturing technology institute around the year 1985 wherein these practices were elevated to being offered as full fledged services to industries. To my best of knowledge, this institute was responsible for making Noise and Vibration services as a packaged offering with tests, measurements, fault diagnosis as its profile.
With the industrialisation post 1980's and further boom added by IT revolution and electronic industry in the years post 2000, the industry consulting requirements for Noise and Vibration rose substantially. While some of the government agencies and institutions of repute pitched into this, the dearth of expertise, resources and overall professionalism required to work on the real life industrial noise and vibration problems created the void.
From around the year 2002 or so, private enterprises slowly and steadily started filling these gaps by building required resources, knowledge base and marketing themself to be visible to the industries using multiple forms of electronic and digital media. These companies also used their shared resources, networking strategies and other refined business practices to deliver quick and comprehensive testing and consulting services to industry.
Extended Noise and Vibration services - Modal, Noise source, Transfer path
Noise and Vibration consulting services, once largely limited to automotive industry, found its way into multiple manufacturing, construction, transportation, consumer durables and many other industry vertices and their subsets. At present, India has over 15 to 20 organised Noise and Vibration engineering services companies offering their services from condition monitoring to qualification and validations tests to root cause / fault diagnosis and more.
Instrumentation resources for N&V consulting
Some of the teams have graduated to becoming the extended consulting arms of large multi-nationals working hand in hand with design teams right from the start of a project and all the way going till validation studies; one such example is of Metro rail coach building and Metro track design companies wherein Noise and Vibration experts are on board as a full time consultant though the entire project, this scenario is improving by the day.
As I write this post, NV Dynamics completes its 20 profound years of leadership in Noise and Vibration engineering. The vision and the efforts to create an Indian team of professionals in the domain has taken its roots and has earned its brand image for qualified services in a variety of industries. With Indian industries expanding by the day, I see a great prospect in the coming years for the Noise and Vibration consulting services.
20 year commemoration - The spectrum of colours of consulting