Investigation of effect of pump rotational speed on performance and detection of cavitation within a centrifugal pump using vibration analysis

Abstract

Cavitation is an essential problem that occurs in any pump. It highly contributes to deteriorating the performance of the pump. In industrial applications, it is important to detect and decrease the effect of the cavitation in pumps. In this work, detecting and diagnosing the cavitation phenomenon within centrifugal pumps using vibration technique was investigated. The results obtained for vibration signal in both time and frequency domains were analysed in order to gain a better understanding about the detection of cavitation in the pumps in question. The effect of different operating conditions including various flow rates and pump rotational speeds related to the cavitation were measured. Different statistical features in time domain analysis (TDA) and also the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) technique for frequency domain analysis (FDA) were applied.