Maintenance and downtime costs of centrifugal pumps in Finnish industry

The maintenance costs of pumps and the cost of downtime caused by failures in centrifugal pumps have been investigated. Over 1500 pumps in a number of plants from various areas of the Finnish pumping industry were investigated. The pumps were classified in five categories with respect to power, ranging from under 5 kW up to over 150 kW. The reasons for malfunction were classified into 34 individual types of faults and their cost effects were studied. The fault causing the highest downtime and maintenance costs is the leakage of the seals. Some examples of the frequency of typical preventive and corrective maintenance actions are also presented. The use of 27 different types of condition monitoring methods were investigated. The most widely used method was the shock pulse measurement (SPM) technique for detecting bearing failures.