Fault Diagnosis of Air Compressor in Nuclear Power Plant Based on Vibration Observation Window

Abstract

Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) have increasing demand to improve safety and reliability of air compressors with various fault diagnosis methods. Fault diagnosis methods may provide early fault warning information for air compressors rapidly and give a reference for maintenance, especially for the serious faults affecting security strongly. In this work, a method framework of fault diagnosis system based on the Vibration Observation Window (VOW) for air compressors is proposed. The VOW constructs a dynamic vibration tensor which presents the operating state of air compressors according to the real time vibration data, strengthens the association among the monitoring data in spatial domain and time domain. Thus, dynamic characteristic, which reflects the fault information, can be contained in the dynamic vibration tensor explicitly. For proving the advantage of VOW method, we compare the performance between the fault diagnosis system with VOW and the fault diagnosis system without VOW based on different hardware environments: embedded computer, and high speed Industrial PC. The results show that the VOW method can both improve the performance of the vibration fault diagnosis system of NPPs in different hardware environments.

Keywords

• Air compressors
• fault diagnosis
• vibration tensor
• nuclear power plants
• VOW method