A quantitative comprehensive safety evaluation method for centrifugal compressors using FMEA-fuzzy operations

Centrifugal compressors are the key equipment in natural gas transportation; therefore, the safety and reliable operation of compressors is of great importance for natural gas transportation. The harsh working conditions and the complex mechanical structure, can easily cause the failure of a centrifugal compressor, and leads to shut down. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct safety evaluation for centrifugal compressors. The conventional safety evaluation methods cannot describe experts' experiences and knowledge accurately, and have calculation defects in risk rating. In order to solve these problems, this study proposed a safe evaluation method based on FMEA-fuzzy reasoning. First, this method performs failure identification of a compressor based on the FMEA method and establishes an expert-failure evaluation model. After that, the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method is used to perform a quantitative analysis on the model to obtain the failure modes' risk levels, and ultimately determines a compressor's risk level. To verify the proposed method, this study performed a risk evaluation for centrifugal compressors in a compressor station. The results of the evaluation showed that the proposed method had a good application effect.