Data Selection Criteria for the Application of Predictive Maintenance to Centrifugal Pumps

The maintenance of vehicles and components is present in most people's daily lives, ranging from changing a private vehicle's oil to the failure prediction of an aircraft component during flight. Usually, the manufacturer's maintenance recommendation is a good solution when the cost is not too high, and the real application is used as indicated by the manufacturer. However, this recommendation can turn unfeasible when there is a significant variation in operational conditions or high maintenance costs. In these cases, the manufacturer's suggestion is typically conservative, leading to unnecessarily high costs. Therefore, the challenge is to find the best approach for optimizing a component's maintenance, given the system in which it is integrated and the associated operational and environmental conditions. Nevertheless, the available information on the loads on the component also plays a role in that choice. This paper proposes to combine case-specific information with generic degradation prediction models to obtain an acceptable but also affordable approach. The objective is to develop data selection criteria to indicate the parameters that have a high impact on the failure prediction, in this case, of a generic impeller pump. Subsequently, the approach delivers to the user an indication of the component remaining useful life using different operational scenarios.