Condition Monitoring of Reciprocating Compressor Based on Acoustic Imaging

Acoustical condition monitoring is capable of extracting the characteristics of operating machinery without installation of accelerometer. With the development of acoustic signal processing, the acoustical condition monitoring reactivates in recent years. One of the efficient technologies is acoustic imaging, which can localize and visualize the sound source position in different frequency band to suppress the noise interference. In this paper, the acoustic imaging technology is applied to perform condition monitoring of reciprocating compressor. The discharge valve leakage (DVL) of second stage cylinder are taken as an instance of compressor leakage. This experiment shows the potential to detect leakages of compressor. Firstly, the sound source positions of an operating reciprocating compressor are computed by an acoustic camera in different frequency bands. Secondly, the root mean square (RMS) are compared with baseline in certain frequency band, particularly the specific frequency of sound only emitted from around faulty position. The result shows that the RMS of DVL in specific frequency band would increase significantly.