Pump Bearing Fault Detection

It's been a whirlwind of a year, transitioning from Royal Air Force (RAF) to civilian life with PFE Limited, it's been a year of new experiences and I have learnt so much with the help of Jake Ford & Paul Ford.

I thought I would share one of the more recent faults that I have detected this year, which I am particularly proud of.

This bearing is off a pump which is critical to this customers process. There is no standby unit to rely on, if this fails, the production stops.

This was the first set of data that we have on this asset, with no previous trend data to refer to, using Acoem's Falcon data collector and a Connection Technology CenterTREA330 accelerometer.

Fortunately, our customer responded quickly to this analysis and planned in a change to a spare before this pump could become an issue.

Here, at the PFE workshop, the pump was stripped down, inspected and the bearing cut open. Here the damage was clearly seen in the outer race of the bearing.

This damage was not causing a problem now, however it would have progressed and became a problem in the future. Without a routine condition monitoring survey being carried out, this asset would have likely failed in-situ and cost the customer production downtime.

pump bearing fault outer race