Keep Your Compressors Under Pressure

Protect Efficiency, Uptime, and Safety with Advanced Compressor Condition Monitoring

The Challenge

Compressors are critical to industrial operations — delivering air and gas under pressure for processes that must run without interruption. From refineries and petrochemical plants to food processing and manufacturing, compressors keep production moving. But when performance slips, efficiency drops, energy costs spike, and failures can halt operations. In high-pressure environments, the stakes include not just downtime, but also safety and compliance risks.

Compressors Are Mission-Critical in:

Without effective monitoring, compressor degradation can quickly cascade into lost production, costly repairs, or hazardous failures.

Monitoring Strategies

Compressors experience a wide range of mechanical, electrical, and process-related faults. Monitoring must combine multiple measurement types to catch both subtle efficiency losses and fast-developing failures.

Key Strategies Include:

  • Vibration Monitoring to detect imbalance, misalignment, and bearing wear
  • Pressure and Flow Analysis to identify leaks, restriction, or declining efficiency
  • Electrical Signature Analysis for load issues and motor-driven faults
  • Infrared (IR) Thermography to detect overheating, lubrication breakdown, or cooling issues
  • Oil and Lubricant Analysis to uncover wear particles and contamination
  • Performance Monitoring to correlate compressor health with throughput and energy consumption

Protect Your Turbines. Protect Your Plant.

Discover how Cutsforth helps you monitor turbomachinery with confidence.

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Industrial Compressor Fault Model

Cutsforth’s Integrated Diagnostic Library deliver a digital blueprint for reliability. These models map every known failure mode to the specific sensors and signal features required to detect it — powering advanced monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics. Each asset is broken down into primary systems and sub-components, defining the boundaries, failure locations, and symptoms that matter most. Input from subject-matter experts add context with optimal sensor locations, criticality and likelihood of each failure mode, and the diagnostic power of each sensor option. The result is fault intelligence built from multiphysics measurements, deep expertise from seasoned reliability engineers, and AI-driven optimization — giving you a complete, actionable view of how assets behave and where they are most likely to fail.

Compressor Major Components and Failure Modes

Click the image hotspots below to see how compressor main components are broken into sub-components with a sample list of associated failure modes for each. Refer to the linked documents below for more details about the Compressor Integrated Diagnostic Model.

Download the Cutsforth Compressor Model Data Sheet for more on compressor failure modes, symptoms, sensors, and criticality.

To learn more about Integrated Diagnostic Models in general, download our Cutsforth Integrated Diagnostic Models White Paper.

The Risks of Doing Nothing

Skipping compressor monitoring exposes plants to serious risks:

  • Unplanned Outages that bring entire process lines down
  • Escalating Energy Costs from inefficient operation
  • Catastrophic Failures damaging rotors, bearings, or casings
  • Safety Incidents from pressure loss, leaks, or ruptures
  • Regulatory Compliance Issues tied to emissions or process reliability

How Cutsforth Helps

Cutsforth provides a complete solution for compressor monitoring — combining technology, expertise, and actionable insights:

  • Unified Software Platform: InsightCM™ integrates measurements, waveforms, and alarms in one pane of glass
  • Measurement Portfolio: monitoring systems across the spectrum of vibration, electrical, thermography, EMI, and more
  • Actionable Insights: AI-powered analytics combined with expert diagnostics to translate raw data into clear recommendations
  • Reliability Services: experienced consultants help assess current practices, design monitoring programs, and implement

With Cutsforth, you gain the early warning system needed to prevent failures, protect uptime, and keep your compressors running at peak efficiency.