Across many industries and throughout the world rotating machinery is ubiquitous. It includes turbo-machinery such as pumps, compressors and turbines as well as electrical machinery like electro-motors and generators. These are critical pieces of machinery in oil and gas facilities as well as in power generation stations where failure can be fatal, environmentally catastrophic and commercially crippling.
This whitepaper, extracted from issue two of Technology Insight looks at a new operational and cost effective methods for rotordynamics assessments, which can aid in both troubleshooting problems and evaluating new designs.
Traditionally, measuring the impact of resonance, where the natural or modal frequencies of the machinery coincide with the frequency of the cyclic forces generated by the machinery during operation, has required stopping the machinery to reduce the impact of normal operating vibrations interfering with the external forces being applied during testing.
Using mature technologies that have proven successful on non-rotating structures, our Machinery Dynamics team has devised a way to measure the model frequencies whilst the machinery is in operation. This novel technique, an industry first, is called: Operational Modal Analysis (OMA).
You can find out more about Operational Modal Analysis and the methods behind it by downloading our whitepaper here.