Remote health condition monitoring of water pump systems

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Water pumps are widely used in industries such as water supply, oil, chemistry, power generation, agriculture, and mining. Any pump element defect could result in pump performance degradation or unexpected shutdowns. The objective of this NSERC-CRD research, in collaboration with the Bare Point Water Treatment Plant in Thunder Bay, Ontario, is to develop new technologies and intelligent tools for remote pump station condition monitoring. It aims to improve operation reliability and reduce maintenance costs by preventing unnecessary machine downtimes. To achieve this goal, advanced research and development will be undertaken in multidisciplinary academic fields including machinery modeling, signal processing, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and mechatronics. Specifically, a new wireless smart sensor network will be developed for data acquisition in forms of such as vibration, electric current and temperature. New signal processing techniques will be proposed for fault detection in pump motors (bearings and rotors) and pump line shaft systems. Comprehensive assessment will be undertaken, experimentally and analytically, to evaluate the robustness of available motor fault detection techniques. A new intelligent classifier will be developed to integrate the strength of several robust fault detection techniques for fault diagnosis of motors and pumps. A smart monitoring platform and a cloud computing protocol will be developed for remote condition monitoring of pump stations. The contributions from this multidisciplinary research will enhance Canada's profile in the global academic community in the related fields. It is also foreseen that the developed technologies and tools can benefit wide array of Canadian industries (e.g., aircraft, nuclear reactors, chemical facilities) to avoid equipment damage, and prevent human injury and environment pollution. In addition, the proposed technologies and tools can be used in health science for human health diagnostics and prognostics.