Smart Vibration Monitoring System for an Ocean Turbine

This paper describes a Smart Vibration Monitoring System (SVMS) developed as an effective way to reduce equipment losses and enhance safety, efficiency, reliability, availability and long life time duration of an ocean turbine. The system utilizes advanced signal processing and analysis techniques to evaluate the health of a machine and identify incipient anomalies (faults) and evaluate their severity relative to the machine's condition. The existing system and planned improvements are described and discussed. The primary function of the SVMS is an automatic machinery fault detection and diagnosis based on real time processing and analysis of vibration data. The SVMS basically performs the same functions as a vibration analyst would for post processing of off-line data. The SVMS automatically sends a warning message to a cell phone and to an email address as soon as it detects a fault that is developing within the machine. The message will contain a generic identification of the fault.