Condition Monitoring of Marine Fuel Oil Separator System

Abstract

Centrifugal Fuel oil separators are very important components in marine industry. Catastrophic failure of centrifugal fuel oil separators can have fatal consequences. The faults in fuel oil separators are hard to detect manually but can be identified by vibration and noise. In this research an approach for condition monitoring of the centrifugal fuel oil separators is presented using vibration analysis and noise analysis. Three axis MEMS accelerometer and piezo type microphone is interfaced with Arduino UNO microcontroller to collect the vibration and acoustic signals. The signals are analyzed with crest factor by a data analysis application developed in Microsoft Visual studio for predicting faults. The system is tested with data acquired in real time from a commercial centrifugal fuel oil separator and high fault detection efficiency is observed.

Data Preprocessing for Vibration Analysis: Application in Indirect Monitoring of ‘Ship Centrifuge Lube Oil Separation Systems’

“…In a high percentage of cases, system damage is caused, being impossible to avoid. These abnormal vibrations in the separator systems are not displayed on the control panel [12,16,29,30].…”

“…To detect changes in the dynamic behavior of a rotating machine, in order to predict or detect faults, it is common to analyze the vibratory signals that are produced during operation, because machine vibration response is sensitive to any structural change [14] and is commonly used to detect sustainable changes in the rotating frequency and its harmonics [15]. Condition monitoring through vibration analysis is becoming more and more common in marine fuel oil separator systems and pipes [12,[16][17][18].…”