Design of a novel electric diagnostic technique for fault analysis of centrifugal pumps

Abstract

Centrifugal pumps are the fundamental components of most industries. They are used in almost every industry to transfer liquid through pipes. The breakdown of a pump causes heavy production losses, and hence, the development of an economical and user-friendly condition monitoring system is vital in order to estimate the health of a pump in a timely manner, and to avoid an unscheduled breakdown. The intrusive condition monitoring techniques (such as vibration analysis and acoustic emission) developed for the fault diagnosis of pumps utilize expensive vibration sensors, and these sensors need to be installed on the pump body for data collection. Non-intrusive techniques (such as motor current analysis) have been proven to be economical, but have limited capabilities for diagnosing the incipient faults in pumps operating in a noisy industrial environment. The electric diagnostic technique (EDT) proposed in this paper does not require the purchase of extra sensors, and instead utilizes the existing sensors, which are usually installed on the machines, to measure and display the motor line current and voltage. The EDT has been developed in the Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench (LabVIEW) so as to measure the three-phase line current, and then transform it into two-phase d-q currents. These d-q currents are plotted as patterns, and the statistical features of these patterns are used to segregate the centrifugal pump fault types. Detailed experiments and evaluations have been performed in order to check the viability of the developed EDT technique.