Institute of Vibration

How Russia is fighting the phenomenon that led to the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station

Increased vibration of the second hydraulic unit is recognized as one of the main causes of the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya HPP. How effectively is Russia fighting this phenomenon?

Vibration is the mechanical vibration of a body. The uninitiated reader will be interested to know how many people in the world whose work activities are connected with this phenomenon. Millions of inhabitants of the earth are engaged in monitoring the vibration state of buildings, structures, machines and equipment, developing and manufacturing means for measuring vibration parameters, balancing equipment, creating scientific institutes, training centers, studying the effects of vibration on the human body, developing regulatory documents and standards.

The Technical Committee on Vibration TK 183 “Vibration and Shock” is also successfully operating in Russia. The number of existing national standards in this area, thanks to the efforts of TC 183, is approaching one hundred and fifty. In addition, the country has about a dozen competitive closed-cycle research and production enterprises that develop (including software) and manufacture tools for measuring vibration parameters that are used in various industries.

The range of controlled objects is very wide. If we talk only about rotary equipment, then these are turbines of thermal, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants, aircraft engines, wheeled vehicles, shafts of almost all types of engines used on land and at sea, drive shafts of automobile transport, shafts of pumps, fans, drives of refrigeration units, equipment for storing and processing grain and much more. From this brief overview, it is clear that vibration levels need to be monitored almost everywhere.

It is important to promptly detect an increase in the vibration level above the permissible value, find and eliminate the causes of increased vibration, otherwise an accident cannot be avoided. But perhaps vibrations with an amplitude of several tens or hundreds of microns are not dangerous? Alas, this is not true. The latest sad event - the August accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station - leaves no reason for doubt. Vibration is a formidable and dangerous phenomenon that must be under constant human control.

At SSHHPP, increased vibration of the turbine of the second hydraulic unit, which arose when its operating modes changed, may have led, on the one hand, to the self-unscrewing of several fastening nuts, and on the other, contributed to the accelerated destruction of worn fastening studs. That same summer, a Tu-204 plane made an emergency landing in Vnukovo, on board which problems arose with a vibration sensor. These are the latest facts.

Experienced specialists in the field of vibration diagnostics and vibration repair can talk for hours about various emergency situations that occurred in their work. It would seem that there is no reason to underestimate the importance of the problem. But questions remain. Measuring equipment produced by domestic and foreign manufacturers is regularly supplied to enterprises in various industries, but how is it used? The basis for its application are national standards and outdated normative documents of the Soviet era, which have long been awaiting meaningful rather than formal updating. But to organize effective equipment vibration control in industries, such a basis is far from sufficient. For this purpose, it is necessary to have certified measurement techniques for each type of equipment. These methods must be recognized by the expert community, undergo the approval procedure in the Rostekhregulirovaniya system and be known to all market participants. Perhaps they should be included in updated industry safety regulations. With a different approach, erroneous assessments and an increase in the risk of emergency situations throughout the country are inevitable.

Federal structures must take upon themselves the organization of a unified methodological approach to vibration control in industries. To carry out this work, it is probably worth attracting the country's leading specialists in the field of vibration diagnostics. These are employees of research institutes, bodies and testing laboratories for conformity assessment in the field of vibrometry, developers and manufacturers of basic equipment, as well as vibrometry tools, leading industry experts, participants in TC 183, members of the public council on vibration, created at one time at RAO " UES of Russia". With the division of the monopoly, this public organization lost its former weight and ability to provide scientific and methodological assistance to enterprises in the industry.

The state of federal legislation, as well as regulatory legal acts, does not fully contribute to improving the safety of the use of machinery and equipment. Thus, the just adopted “Technical Regulations on the Safety of Machinery and Equipment”, as well as the “Technical Regulations on the Safety of Wheeled Vehicles” do not contain requirements for ensuring vibration safety. At the same time, some provisions of the regulations set out the most general requirements for ensuring safety, and all responsibility for the completeness of taking into account possible risks is shifted to the designer (developer) and manufacturer. The fundamental technical regulations on vibration safety are not even included in Article 9 of the federal law “On Technical Regulation” as one of the priority technical regulations. These facts indicate the methodological costs of the Federal Law “On Technical Regulation,” which allows for the omission of serious risks.

The general picture of insufficient attention to the problem of vibration control in industry is complemented by the state of fundamental regulatory documents. Thus, the list of products subject to mandatory certification (Rostekhregulirovaniya document), as well as the list of technical devices used at hazardous production facilities (Rostechnadzor document), do not include vibrometry tools. For this reason, they were also not included in the areas of accreditation of conformity assessment bodies in the GOST R certification system.

To be fair, it should be noted that in recent years, the Rostechnadzor system has developed several regulatory documents that provide requirements for monitoring the vibration state of conveyors and some types of mining equipment. But for now this is a drop in the ocean. At the same time, it is unacceptable for such documents to be created in the interests of any manufacturer or even developed by one of the product manufacturers.

Perhaps the time has come to discuss the creation of a national vibration institute. It is expensive to have a specialized research institute in each industry, but creating one intersectoral research institute and organizing its interaction with the federal structures that oversee the relevant industries is quite feasible and useful.

Such a research institute could, at the request of federal structures and enterprises, carry out scientific research and development, provide the necessary methodological assistance to industrial enterprises, train and certify specialists (including at the international level), formulate mandatory (within the framework of technical regulations) and innovative requirements for products and etc.

After the accident at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, the state must clearly understand how important it is to take into account all known and calculated risks to prevent disasters. Vibration is one of them.

Vladimir NEIMAN, candidate of technical sciences