Concept of an advanced monitoring, control and diagnosis system for positive displacement pumps

This paper describes an innovative concept for an advanced monitoring, control and diagnosis system for pumps. According to leading experts about 20% of the electrical energy used in industry is used for pumps and about 30% of this energy could be saved if intelligent control systems would be applied. In spite of this fact, currently very often no control at all is used. The causes for this low application ratio were investigated in detail. The findings can be summarized to the insight that only an integrated control and diagnosis will be able to overcome the opposition towards such systems in industry. This integrated control and diagnosis systems can assure to operate pumps and systems in the best efficiency point (operating on demand), to prevent pump failures and break downs (fault protection) or to indicate maintaining actions required to the user based on pump type and the operating conditions (maintenance on demand). Furthermore, in other industries today usually the operation data of all systems are being monitored for several reasons; these reasons are discussed in detail in this paper. Such monitoring of pumps is currently also not realized but could be an additional function of a control and diagnosis system. The application of a system for monitoring, control and diagnosis systems means a shift of paradigm and has therefore be consciously planned and be based on well-considered concept. A concept for such systems is proposed in this paper. The considerations and proposals are based on a collaboration of three Universities and a world-leading production company for pumps.