Patent ID: 7606673

Claim:
A method of analyzing vibrations of a bearing installed in a rotating machine comprising the steps of: accessing vibration data corresponding to the bearing to be analyzed; determining a degraded condition factor BD for the bearing from the vibration data; selecting an expected designer-determined mean-time-to-failure MTTF of the bearing operating under a design load in the operating environment of the rotating machine; selecting a forecast time period; calculating a reduced mean-time-to-failure RMTTF of the bearing using the expected designer-determined mean-time-to-failure MTTF and the degraded condition factor BD; calculating a probability of failure of the bearing in the forecast time period using the reduced mean-time-to-failure RMTTF; accessing cost data corresponding to a cost of failure of the bearing in the rotating machine; calculating a financial risk from the calculated probability of failure in the forecast time period and the cost data; and displaying, on a computer display, the financial risk for the selected time period.