Bently Nevada
Bently Nevada is an asset protection and condition monitoring hardware, software and service company for industrial plant-wide operations.
Don Bently was the first to manufacture a commercially successful eddy-current proximity probe which measured vibration in high-speed turbomachinery by allowing the direct observation of the rotating shaft.
The company also performed research in the field of rotordynamics, furthering knowledge of machinery malfunctions such as shaft cracks and fluid-induced instabilities.
[2] Bently Nevada was privately held until 2002 when it was acquired by General Electric and became part of GE Oil and Gas.
Since the inception of the proximity probe, Bently Nevada has been a key company in the asset protection and condition monitoring market.
[7] In 1956, he left the aerospace industry and gave up completing a doctorate degree to form Bently Scientific Company, manufacturing and selling eddy-current products via mail order from his garage in Berkeley, California.
[11][12][8] Don Bently began with miniature vacuum tubes but soon realized the advantages offered by solid-state components.
[8]: 25 He was the first to transistorize the design and make it commercially practical as a means to measure machine vibration and thrust position protection systems in rotating machinery.
Don Bently operated the business by himself and designed to order "distance detectors" that produced very precise bench-top measurements.
Previous to the introduction of the so-called "Bently probe," this shaft motion had to be indirectly inferred by measuring the vibration of the machine's casing.
[8]: 26 Bently included the ability to generate alarms if vibration levels were excessive, which could alert operators and turn off the machine if necessary.
Bently's pioneering design for shaft vibration measurement using proximity probes became the de facto industry standard for turbomachinery acceptance testing and machinery protection.
[16] The eddy-current proximity probe became the preferred method for assessing vibration and overall mechanical condition on large turbomachinery employing fluid bearings.
[17] Such machines and bearing types account for the vast majority of compressors, turbines, pumps, electric motors, generators, and other rotating equipment exceeding 1,000 HP, and can be found in abundance in most industrial plants.
The company continued to expand, making diagnostic instruments such as spectrum analyzers, tunable filters, and other signal conditioning and recording apparatus, in addition to its sensors and monitors.
Its objective was to conduct rotordynamic research, furthering the knowledge of rotating machinery behavior, modeling techniques, and malfunction diagnostic methodologies.
[20][21] BRDRC made a number of important contributions to the field of rotordynamics such as a better understanding of fluid-induced instabilities, advanced models for understanding shaft crack behavior, insight into rubbing malfunctions between stationary and rotating parts, and enhancement of the rotordynamic equations with a new variable lambda (λ) which denoted "the fluid circumferential average velocity ratio".
They had built brick barns at Orchard and Buckeye Roads, known as Ferris Heights, that allowed them to breed sheep earlier in the year.
[12] By then the company had 1,200 people at its headquarters in Minden, Nevada, 2,100 employees worldwide, 100 offices in more than 40 countries, and global sales exceeding $235 million USD.
