Pump Health Monitoring Test Environment for Diagnosing the Erosive Effects from Cavitation

Cavitation occurs frequently in pumps. The subsequent erosion that is caused by cavitation can significantly reduce the operational efficiency and Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of the pump. This study describes a new hybrid Health Monitoring (HM) test environment, used to diagnose permanent damage caused by cavitation erosion in a two-stage centrifugal pump. Flowrate, pressure and motor current measurements are made and compared to Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) results. The hybrid-based HM carried out using the three methods provide the facility to develop diagnostics for cavitation erosion damage. The suggested methods will not only aid in HM development, but also select the best operating conditions to carry it out. The Gray Level Method (GLM) is implemented using CFD to predict the erosion areas in the centrifugal pump. A Simscape model is devised to enable development of health monitoring algorithms. Few works have attempted to detect for erosion caused by cavitation. It was found that a high-level agreement was achieved between the Simscape, CFD and test-rig results, with an average error of 0.8%, 2.5%, and 2.0% for current, pressure and flow measurements respectively. The results from this research show the feasibility of developing HM algorithms to detect cavitation erosion in aircraft fuel pumps by fusing model and data-based methods. This is an enabler for a move from time-based to condition-based maintenance, thus reducing aircraft operating costs.