Systems for real-time comprehensive health monitoring of equipment

Monitoring purposes for technical objects are: a timely detection of incipient malfunctions, an observation of their development up to a critical state and a timely personnel warning on malfunctions occurrence in order to develop measures aimed at ensuring a maximal duration of the unit operation and a timely fault-free decommissioning for repair.

The monitoring time interval, starting with preparation for measurements and up to fulfillment of regulations, should be significantly shorter than the malfunctions development interval from the moment of detection to a critical level. Results of the units large-scale monitoring at petrochemical complexes show that the minimal intervals of malfunctions development up to critical levels do not exceed 10-20 minutes, but they can be significantly shorter – up to 3-5 minutes – due to the “human factor” adverse effect. The necessity to prevent accidents caused by such factors has determined emergence of automatic stationary systems for health monitoring of hazardous production facilities units, primarily in petrochemistry, metallurgy and railway transportation.

Thus, the radical difference between monitoring and diagnostics lies in necessity of taking into account the time factor. This gives us the following definition of the unit health monitoring (unit monitoring) - monitoring of the unit technical state (design of machine, unit, mechanism) for determination and prediction of entering the limiting state. Monitoring is diagnostics, expanded in time. The fundamental difference between health monitoring and parameters monitoring is the presence of the measured parameters interpreter in terms of the unit technical state (expert system for decision-making support on the unit health and further control).

Kostyukov V.N. Systems for real-time comprehensive health monitoring of equipment // NEFTEGAZ. - 2010. - pp. 44-45

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