Evolution Of A Mechanical Seal Condition Monitoring System

Abstract

Mechanical face seals have been used in fluid handling equipment for many years, with a long history of reliability and safety. Most users of mechanical seals, however, tend to have a few critical service areas where process operating conditions, changes, design, or installation problems, result in high maintenance dollar expenses, and a solution to these repeat problems can result in large savings through increasing the meantime between failures. The actual operating conditions in the seal chamber are frequently not known by the users. Process variables such as pressure, temperature, injection flow, and equipment wear on mechanical vibration problems, have a direct influence on seal performance. Process or operational upsets which cause seal leakage are frequently hard to detect. The development is documented of a seal monitoring system which was designed to measure and record actual operating conditions at a field site. A methodology to analyze the recorded data to determine how the system operating conditions influence seal performance is included. A case history of actual field use of the monitoring system are reviewed.