The early warning system for your pumps
Would you run your car without ever keeping an eye on the mpg? If you run your pumps without fluid monitoring, that’s effectively what you’re doing with these important assets. So, if you want to be sure your pumps are performing at their most efficient, you need Rubix Industrial Services Smart Asset Management (SAM).
In theory, every pump is designed for a specific duty. When it performs at that duty point, the maximum amount of energy will be converted into the required head and flow, efficiency will be at its optimum, mechanical stress and vibration will be minimal.
However, even brand-new pumps can operate much less efficiently than planned for, simply because they may have been under or over-specified. It’s a fact that most engineers will build in additional safety margins for head, flow, and so on. Then the supplier will probably do the same. Once the pump is installed, small changes to the system can have major effects on the pump's operating point.
The result is that the pump moves further and further away from its original design duty, and its efficiency drifts further and further away from the optimum BEP – Best Efficiency Point, causing mechanical stress, vibration and energy losses. Without fluid monitoring, you won’t know until it’s too late.
Get upstream of your pumping issues
Whether it’s due to over-specification or changes to the duty, your pumps can develop issues which should not be left to get worse.
Fluid turbulence, aeration, or cavitation, for example, will cause vibration. But if you are only vibration monitoring your bearings, the problem could be misdiagnosed as a bearing issue. Fluid monitoring, linked to the Rubix Industrial Services SAM platform, would have enabled you to spot the issue at its infancy, resolve the root cause, restore the pump to its duty point, and avoid damage or pump failure.
All the data, all the time
A snapshot is fine for your holiday memories. But a snapshot of a pump’s performance will only tell you what’s happening at one particular moment. Five minutes later, anything and everything may have changed. The strength of the SAM platform is that it provides continual real-time monitoring and displays not only how the monitored pump should be operating, but also how it actually is.
So at any time it’s easy to see where and how far it drifts away from its optimum parameters or situations that cause large swings across the pump curve. That’s important because, when it does, problems can quickly be compounded.
Changes that lead away from the design duty – such as altering the system’s hydraulic characteristic, will reduce efficiency to a far greater extent, while having a negative effect on both energy consumption and reliability. The SAM platform helps you to spot these changes and take the necessary action before they become more serious or irreversible.
Pumping money down the drain?
With the information fluid monitoring provides, you can see where your pumps are losing efficiency, where they’re wasting energy, and where they are costing you money.
By determining where a pump is operating in relation to its duty point, fluid monitoring allows you to calculate and compare the optimum pumping cost with the actual cost. And by identifying where the inefficiencies are arising, you can take the necessary steps – such as refurbishing the pump, or coating the internals it to reduce friction – to enhance its performance, increase its efficiency and lower its operating cost.
Fluid monitoring with the SAM platform effectively gives you Rubix Industrial Services know-how on a dashboard, to minimise problems and maximise efficiency.
Click here for more information on Asset Management, or contact your Local Branch, who will be happy to discuss your options with you.
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