In industry it is very common that pumps are not operating in their optimal operation point. The consequences are too expensive operation costs and higher loads on individual components of the entire plant. For this reason a method to detect the current operation point of a centrifugal pump has been developed.
The object is to introduce this method during the operation and without changing anything in the system. This method focuses on the monitoring of the vibrations of different operation points of the pump curve through the analysis of time signals of a single vibration acceleration sensor. To identify the current operation point the vibrations of an unknown point are compared to the vibrations of the known points. Extensive laboratory tests have been conducted for this contribution. For implementation of these investigations a test loop was designed. In the first step different time signals from several pump curves have been recorded. The recorded time signals are reduced to a few succinct values, by means of the method of time signal analyses. To classify these values the so called support vector machine is used.