Sygnology

Complex machinery such as reciprocating compressors have a number of wear, damage and failure modes which can be difficult to detect. Often symptoms don’t appear until wear and damage are so severe that repair is needed or failure is imminent. Expensive machine condition monitoring instrumentation, hardware and software, and analytics services using huge volumes of high frequency data are often not installed or not practical even on some critical equipment and portable devices and services require many expensive and frequent service calls. An effective, low cost, continual monitoring service that makes use of available instrumentation and data to detect the onset of wear and damage is needed. Three stage, six cylinder, reciprocating compressors used to compress a relatively low volume of natural gas for liquification were experiencing frequent and varied failures through a combination of harmonic vibrations, stage imbalance, liquid carryover ring, valve, piston and rod bearing damage. Repeated efforts to balance the unit and address liquid carryover was having mixed results. The customer needed better assurance their efforts were addressing the issues.

Sygnology Feature Extraction identified minute anomalous changes in equipment mechanical performance that are precursors to wear and damage. Feature extraction makes use of any available instrument that can serve as proxies for kinetic signals including pressure transducers, flow meters, tachometers, vibration sensors or accelerometers, etc. Our process can detect liquids entering the compressor, mechanical issues such as ring or valve wear, load and stage imbalance, mechanical binding, as well as surging pulsing and other harmonics. No new instruments or systems were required, just the time series data either online or in batch form. Periodic follow up analysis has shown periods of liquid ingestion and stage imbalance from time to time which is reported to the customer so adjustments are made to reduce further damage.