Cavitation detection of butterfly valve using support vector machines

Abstract

Butterfly valves are popularly used in service in the industrial and water works pipeline systems with large diameter because of its lightweight, simple structure and the rapidity of its manipulation. Sometimes cavitation can occur, resulting in noise, vibration and rapid deterioration of the valve trim, and do not allow further operation. Thus, monitoring of cavitation is of economic interest and is very important in industry. This paper proposes a condition monitoring scheme using statistical feature evaluation and support vector machine (SVM) to detect the cavitation conditions of butterfly valve which used as a flow control valve at the pumping stations. The stationary features of vibration signals are extracted from statistical moments. The SVMs are trained, and then classify normal and cavitation conditions of control valves. The SVMs with the reorganized feature vectors can distinguish the class of the untrained and untested data. The classification validity of this method is examined by various signals acquired from butterfly valves in the pumping stations. And the classification success rate is compared with that of self-organizing feature map neural network (SOFM).