Troubleshooting and diagnosis of process equipment

Most calls are not about a machine that has stopped. They are about a machine that still turns and is no longer the same one: a gravel noise at the suction, a bearing housing warmer than the one beside it, flow falling away towards the end of a shift, a seal weeping two months after it was fitted. The fault is visible. The cause is not.

We redo the calculation before we touch the part. Suction and discharge pressure, the real liquid temperature, absorbed current at the motor and the duty profile across a full day: those four readings put the operating point back on the curve and name the cause. DRN Industriel has troubleshot process equipment for more than 35 years.

A gravel noise with unstable flow reports cavitation, which is a shortage at the suction and not a fault in the impeller. A bearing hot on one side only reports misalignment, or pipework pulling on the flange. A vibration that appears once the line is hot and disappears when it cools is almost always pipe expansion. A slow loss of flow with no noise at all reports a wear ring clearance that has opened up and is recirculating.

Take suction and discharge pressure while the machine runs, convert the difference into head, and put that point back on the curve of the impeller actually fitted. Take the motor current at the same moment. Record the liquid temperature as it is, not as the specification says. Then describe what changed on the installation in the preceding weeks. Those four things separate a machine problem from a system problem, and only the second comes back after a repair.

Changing the part straight away looks faster, and half the time it is. The other half, the machine comes back with the same fault inside a month and the outage is counted twice instead of once. The four readings above take under an hour and need nothing taken apart.

Give us the noise, the temperature, the pressures you measured and what changed on the installation. We come back with what to check and in what order.