Why It Matters:
The enduring popularity of reciprocating compressors is due in part to their flexibility. Their ability to handle different loads, speeds, volumes, and gases makes them a favorite for operators and a nightmare for failure detection modules in condition monitoring systems. The reason is that varying operating conditions often result in dynamic changes of machine behavior – for example, the vibration fingerprint. Detection of these operating condition changes and the alignment of the threshold setting in parallel can be extremely complex and – if not done properly – will lead to inaccurate results.
The Best Approach:
Operating condition definitions and their corresponding threshold settings can be set manually – but it takes weeks to drill down the entire set of thresholds for
all analyses, for all measured values and for all operating conditions. Look for a monitoring system that performs these adjustments automatically. After a short learning phase, state-of-the-art applications automatically identify changing operating conditions – based on trend data of the machine – and precisely adjust all affected threshold settings in real time to avoid false alarms and missed detects.
