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Preventing accidents before they happen: Let’s take a look at the application of condition monitoring sensors in predictive maintenance of pumps

Posted by Balluff on Jul 4, 2020 7:51:21 AM

Various types of machine pumps, which are widely used as general-purpose machines, are mainly used to transport fluid or pressurize fluid to increase liquid energy, especially in the chemical industry, petroleum, food and beverage, mining, urban water supply and drainage and other larger industries, of which most are characterized by high temperature, high pressure, and corrosiveness.

Nowadays, with the continuous improvement of the degree of automation and intelligence of production equipment, production efficiency has also been improved, and the reliability of the operation of important equipment such as pumps has also become higher. According to various industry surveys, taking a refinery with a daily output of 200,000 barrels of refined products as an example, the unplanned shutdown of a typical refinery can cause a planned capacity drop of 0.2%, and 7% of the annual maintenance budget is for pump maintenance.

In fact, there are many factors that affect the health condition of the pump, such as: cavitation damages the internal flow of the pump and affects the seal failure; high temperature caused by liquid retention damages the pump body; seal ring damage and internal failures caused by vibration; improper installation causes misalignment of the shaft, resulting in excessive vibration causing pump failure, etc.

 

Condition monitoring is easy to use

The traditional method of monitoring and diagnosing machine pump equipment is either repaired after the accident or relies on equipment diagnosis engineers to use regular inspections to determine the cause and location of equipment failure based on experience. However, due to the large number of pumps, the number of diagnostic engineers is far from meeting the needs of equipment analysis and diagnosis. This would result in not finding the equipment problems in time and cause potential safety hazards.

Balluff's new multi-function condition monitoring sensor BCM can simultaneously detect a variety of machine pump condition variables, such as vibration, temperature, etc., and pre-process the data (for example, calculating the root mean square value for evaluating the vibration level, calculating the peak factor for characterizing the peak value, and detecting the kurtosis and skewness of various types of deterioration). It can also detect the minimum and maximum values of the acceleration (RMS) vector component within a certain time window, and so on. Finally, the necessary data is transmitted to the main system through the IO-Link interface, which is convenient for further analysis and processing of the predictive model.

 

condition-monitoring-sensor

 

The standard IO-Link protocol allows users to easily set sensor parameters and configure them according to specific applications. The process data structure allows free configuration and cyclic transmission of five types of measured or pre-processed data and can also perform acyclic requests for additional statistical processing variables.

In addition, users can also use the automatic monitoring of measurement or processing variables to define the threshold of the pre-alarm or main alarm and can issue a warning message to give a reminder when a problem event occurs.

Based on Balluff’s BCM series of multi-function condition monitoring sensors, equipment engineers can set intermittent/continuous monitoring of a series of parameters online, such as vibration and temperature data, through time domain feature analysis, spectrum analysis, etc. If the parameter exceeds the allowable value, it will set off an alarm, and if necessary, stop the machine for maintenance.

On the other hand, it can further accurately grasp the running status of the pump set, greatly reduce the maintenance workload, timely discover the abnormal situation of the pump, and eliminate hidden safety hazards.

BCM can provide detailed suggestions for the maintenance management and operation and maintenance plan of the pump, thereby reducing the regular return of the pump to the repair factory for maintenance, saving maintenance costs and reducing the impact of maintenance on normal production, and finally achieving intelligent diagnosis and condition-based predictive maintenance.

Through the Balluff BCM sensor system, the important factory asset of the pump can also achieve condition monitoring and predictive maintenance requirements faster and better.

Topics: PredictiveMaintenance, ConditionMonitoring

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