Condition Monitoring of a Reciprocating Air Compressor Using Vibro-Acoustic Measurements

Abstract

Fault diagnosis in reciprocating compressor (RC) requires time-consuming feature-extraction processes due to the complexity of the compressor operation and fluid–solid interaction. This causes the useful information to be corrupted and difficulty in accurately diagnosing the faults with traditional methods. The aerodynamic phenomenon has a large impact on acoustics signal compared to the vibration. Thus, this paper presents analytical modelling of compressor sound highlighting the important sound sources and their generation. The additional contribution of this paper is the application of a state-of-the-art signal processing technique: Modulation Signal Bispectrum (MSB) which overcomes the challenges by showing good noise suppression capability and characterising the modulating components present in the signal, thereby resulting in stable modulation components for accurate diagnostics. The result reveals that the fault diagnosis based on airborne acoustics using MSB method outperformed the vibration-based method.