One nuclear power generating facility, located in the Northeastern United States, relies on four vertical service water pumps to feed water to a heat exchanger which cools the sealed ultrapure water/steam that drives the turbine generators.

Of the four identical service water pumps, all of which had 30-foot-long shafts, two of the pumps began to exhibit some performance issues.

This motivated the maintenance team to conduct a performance study on their vertical service water pumps, which were quite old (they had been installed when the nuclear power generating plant had been built in the early 1970’s).

The nuclear power generating facility’s maintenance team planned to analyze a number of measurements, including vibration, pressure, and flow. They also wanted to perform electrical signature analysis as part of the pump performance assessment, so they contacted Bob Dunn at I & E Central; a company known for providing on-site predictive maintenance services as well as distributing industrial test equipment for predictive maintenance (PdM), electrical and reliability professionals.

Dunn went to the nuclear power plant to perform the electrical signature analysis on two of the 350-horsepower, 480-volt motors.

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