Condition Monitoring as a Pathway for Sustainable Operation: A Case Study for Vibration Analysis on Centrifugal Pumps

Centrifugal pumps have many applications in our daily life ranging from domestic to industrial complexes. Cavitation is one of the most common problems that occur in pumps and affects their performance. Furthermore, it can damage the pump component itself. Using condition monitoring, especially vibration analysis, cavitation in pumps can be detected so that the operator can take necessary measures to eliminate its source before losing the pump. This will lead to decreasing the number of newly manufactured pumps as the pump life will increase eventually while reducing the pollution produced during the pump manufacturing process. In this paper, condition monitoring is applied to a real test case of a typical boiler feed water centrifugal pump in a certain industrial facility that suffers from cavitation. The vibration analyzer CSI 2140 was applied, and a root cause analysis is presented. Recommendations from this study are presented to avoid the occurrence of this phenomenon again and to increase the health time of the pump. Results show that using condition monitoring, especially vibration analysis, assists in detecting cavitation in centrifugal pumps at early stages.