Performance degradation assessment of slurry pumps

Abstract

Slurry pumps are widely used in oil sand pumping operations to enhance the potential and kinetic energy of liquid and solid mixtures and pump the mixtures from one place to another place. The rotating impellers of slurry pumps operate continuously and they are unavoidably abraded and eroded by the transferring liquids and solids. Therefore, impeller wear is one of the major causes for slurry pump breakdown. In order to ensure the high reliability of the use of impellers and prevent the occurrence of impeller failures, the performance degradation assessment of impellers is necessary to be investigated. In this paper, a moving-average mean wear degradation index and a moving-average deviation wear degradation index are proposed to track the health condition of the impellers used in oil sand pumps. The influence of different parameters on the performance degradation assessment is discussed. The vibration signals collected from an industrial oil sand pump are used to validate the proposed impeller heath indicators. The results show that the proposed health indicators are effective in describing the impeller health state evolution.