FRICTION TORQUE AND LEAKAGE BASED DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH FOR ROTARY SEAL PROGNOSTICS IN MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY

Rotary seals are found in many manufacturing equipment and machines used for various applications under a wide range of operating conditions. Rotary seal failure can be catastrophic and can lead to costly downtime and large expenses; so it is extremely important to assess the degradation of rotary seal to avoid fatal breakdown of machineries. Physics-based rotary seal prognostics require direct estimation of different physical parameters to assess the degradation of seals. Data-driven prognostics utilizing sensor technology and computational capabilities can aid in the in-direct estimation of rotary seals' running condition unlike the physics-based approach. An important aspect of data-driven prognostics is to collect appropriate data in order to reduce the cost and time associated with the data collection, storage and computation. Seals in machineries operate in harsh conditions, especially in the oil field, seals are exposed to harsh environment and aggressive fluids which gradually reduces the elastic modulus and hardness of seals, resulting in lower friction torque and excessive leakage. Therefore, in this study we implement a data-driven prognostics approach which utilizes friction torque and leakage signals along with Multilayer Perceptron as a classifier to compare the performance of the two metrics in classifying the running condition of rotary seals. Friction torque was found to have a better performance than leakage in terms of differentiating the running condition of rotary seals throughout its service life. Although this approach was designed for seals in oil and gas industry, this approach can be implemented in any manufacturing industry with similar applications.