Coast-Down Time Monitoring for Defect Detection in Rotating Equipment

TLDR: In this article, the authors used the coast-down time (CDT) to detect the defects of the shaft assembly and found that the speed decay pattern followed a second order fitting of percentage speed reduction as a function of time.

Abstract: Rotating equipment under the action of dynamic forces, are prone to defects, such as misalignment, unbalance, change of rotor slope, skewed bearings, etc. These defects, if ignored for prolonged periods can cause sudden outages that may have serious consequences. Therefore, application of an appropriate condition monitoring technique is desirable to assess the health of the equipment and plan its maintenance. In this paper, monitoring of coast-down time (CDT) is undertaken to meet the objective. The CDT is the time elapsed between the instant the power is switched off to the rotor system till it comes to rest. The work demonstrates that, the CDT does detect the defects of the shaft assembly. Experiments were conducted on a specifically fabricated rig. The results revealed that the speed decay pattern followed a second order fitting of percentage speed reduction as a function of time. Defect identification parameter (DIP) is defined, which is a ratio of the polynomial coefficients of the first and the second order terms. The DIP values were found to correlate uniquely with the unbalance and the radial off-set defects in the shaft assembly.