A review of fault diagnosis and prognosis for oil pumping machines

Oil pumping machines play a key role in petroleum extraction. However, oil pumping units are prone to faults due to age and harsh operational environments, which may have adverse impacts on production safety and availability, driving urgent needs for condition monitoring, fault diagnosis, and prognosis. In this paper, various faults in oil pumping units are examined, and fault diagnosis methods for oil pumping machines are reviewed. The diagnosis approaches are discussed following the categorizations of signal-based methods and knowledge-based techniques for oil pumping machines. Emerging fault diagnosis approaches, including digital-twin-based methods and large-language-model-based techniques, are surveyed. Fault prognosis for oil pumping machines is also briefly reviewed. Finally, the perspective challenges and future directions are provided for fault diagnosis and prognosis in oil pumping units.