By using fiber-optic sensors to measure wall thickness, gas pipeline operators can track and monitor how quickly pipelines are corroding. Linking the sensors to networked monitoring instrumentation allows them to do this remotely.

By keeping tabs on your equipment's lubricating fluids, you can prolong the operating life of your machinery and reduce the cost of ownership.

If you've ever worked while resting a laptop computer on your lap, you know that computers emit heat, and the more powerful the computer, the greater the heat produced. This is a problem because electronics really don't enjoy elevated temperatures. A hot computer is a slow computer or, worse, a computer that will cease functioning.

While many bearings can fail due to lack of lubrication, over-lubrication is considered one of the major causes of bearing failure.

Scientists at the University of Manchester, U.K., are developing a new type of wireless sensor to remotely monitor mechanical parts and systems and allow predictions of breakdowns in advance of failure.

BP's Loch Rannoch project began by testing the effectiveness and reliability of a promising wireless network technology and then went on to develop a commercial system that could be used in the company's refineries.

You all remember Ohm's law and the definition of electrical resistance as the ability of a circuit to resist the flow of electrical current. Although useful, Ohm's law applies to only one circuit element and assumes it to be an ideal resistor. Real-world circuit elements are more complex and exhibit resistive, capacitive, and inductive behavior that together define its impedance.

Vibrational theory can seem overwhelming, but it does prove manageable to those who wish to use the modal parameters within a single frequency response function as indicators of product health.