Preliminary exploration: Fault diagnosis of the circulating-water heat exchangers based on sound sensor and non-destructive testing technique

A heat exchanger is a piece of equipment built for efficient heat transfer from one medium to another, which is very important to petrochemical enterprises. Since heat system often uses industrial circulating water as cooling water, the heat exchanger is prone to scale, clogging and leakage, resulting in sub-standard products and even serious economic losses. Therefore, how to monitor and find out heat exchangers scaling, clogging and leaking timely is a very import subject for petrochemical enterprises. When fluid flow through narrow pipes within heat exchangers, it will cause the pipes to vibrate and produce sound. If there exists congestion, the heat exchanger would produce a different sound from that in normal. Thus, in this paper, we explore the probability of using sound sensors for large heat exchanger fault diagnosis in petrochemical enterprises. Our extensive experiments show that it is very difficult to use sound detection technology for fault diagnosis of large circulating water heat exchangers because environmental noise is too large. It is necessary to continue to explore and improve the fault diagnosis of large circulating water heat exchanger using Non-destructive testing technology of sound sensor.