Reciprocating compressors are widely used in industry for various purposes and faults occurring in them can degrade their performance, consume additional energy and even cause severe damage to the machine. Vibration monitoring techniques are often used for early fault detection and diagnosis, but it is difficult to prescribe a given set of effective diagnostic features because of the wide varie...

The economizer principle is a well-known method to reduce the expansion losses of a refrigeration system. The alternative refrigerant CO2 has a relatively large isentropic exponent. Therefore it has a high potential for raising efficiency by application of this principle. Reciprocating piston compressors are favored for CO2 refrigeration applications due to their small sealing length and theref...

Standards stating •good practice• have had an undeniable influence on the demand for extensive dynamic analysis in the design of pipe systems for reciprocating compressors. The merits of such an approach have to be acknowledged in complex systems or when difficult service conditions must be taken into account. But in many cases it is possible to use empirical analytical methods which are less e...