An Experimental Study of Clogging Fault Diagnosis in Heat Exchangers Based on Vibration Signals

The water-circulating heat exchangers employed in petrochemical industrials have attracted great attention in condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. In this paper, an approach based on vibration signals is proposed. By the proposed method, vibration signals are collected for different conditions through various high-precision wireless sensors mounted on the surface of the heat exchanger. Furthermore, by analyzing the characteristics of the vibration signals, a database of fault patterns is established, which therefore provides a scheme for conditional monitoring of the heat exchanger. An experimental platform is set up to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach, and support vector machine based on dimensionless parameters is developed for fault classification. The results have shown that the proposed method is efficient and has achieved a high accuracy for benchmarking vibration signals under both normal and faulty conditions.