Sea Water Injection Pump presenting signs of misalignment
Learn how early detection of abnormal vibrations in a seawater injection pump by Shape Lighthouse led to timely corrective action, preventing costly downtime. Read the full story to learn more about how our monitoring solutions can safeguard your operations.
Plant:
Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO)​
Equipment:
Sea Water Injection, Centrifugal Pump
Description:
The client has 188 large centrifugal pumps monitored by Shape Lighthouse in multiple plants, supporting its centralized condition-based monitoring strategy. Among them are 31 seawater injection centrifugal pumps. On March 31st, Shape Lighthouse called the user’s attention to one of its pumps, bringing to light an abnormal behavior on drive-end side vibration sensors compared to historical training data and possible misalignment issues. The early detection of the abnormal behaviors, before any other means, allowed the condition monitoring team to conduct a root cause investigation and perform a corrective planned intervention to fix the issue without impacting production, preventing further damage and unexpected shutdowns.
Event summary:
How does Shape Lighthouse detect the issue?
On March 31st, a failure mode detection algorithm raised an alarm in Shape Lighthouse, pointing out an abnormality in the pump vibration. The algorithm identified that the readings started to diverge from their normal behavior compared to the historical data for the given operational condition.
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​​A consequence of no Shape Lighthouse detection:
As the vibration amplitude levels did not reach the control room alarm setpoints, the situation could have been unnoticed by operation, delaying weeks or months the identification of the root cause and the planning and scheduling steps to fix the issue.
If the vibration continues to rise due to misalignment cause, it could cause further bearing or coupling damage scenarios and equipment trips. Misalignment stresses the coupling and other connected components, leading to accelerated wear, fatigue, and potential damage to the centrifugal pump.
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Action after Shape Lighthouse identification:
Supported by Shape Lighthouse platform data centralization, which unifies the information of other specialized tools, the planned corrective maintenance order was issued and executed after the alarm.
Savings:
How savings were calculated:
Savings financial values were calculated based on the client's past similar events related to this failure mode and possible consequences, supported by the Shape Lighthouse savings calculation feature.
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Consequence (unavailability):
Pump catastrophic damage due to coupling blade severe damage. (up to 30 days of equipment unavailability and partial downtime of the WI system).
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Maintenance scope:
Pump maintenance overhaul, Coupling blade, and shims replacement. After corrective maintenance intervention, the incurred actual cost was $16,177 which is being deducted from the overall estimated savings.
Avoided losses: