A case study: Monitoring heat exchanger based on vibration sensors and nondestructive testing technique

Flow-induced tube vibration could cause serious damage on large-scale circulating-water heat exchanger in factories, e.g., atomic reactors, nuclear power plants, petroleum and chemical industry. Therefore, efficient inspection technology is very important for heat exchanger's blockage and leakage. The existing detection technologies, like temperature test and pressure test, are very easily affected by extraneous factors, e.g., temperature and pressure, while the nondestructive testing technology based on vibration sensors is free from above limits. In this paper, we use vibration sensors to detect blockage and leakage of the circulating-water heat exchanger. According to the experimental results, it is found that when detecting heat exchanger's blockage and leakage with vibration sensors, environmental vibration from the working machines has influence upon the result, while pump vibration and vibration produced by liquid flowing through regulating-valve make little difference. Nevertheless, fault diagnosis of large-scale circulating-water heat exchanger, which uses nondestructive testing technology based on vibration sensors, needs to be further improved.