A Literature Review of Fault Diagnosis Based on Ensemble Learning

The accuracy of fault diagnosis is an important indicator to ensure the reliability of key equipment systems. Ensemble learning integrates different weak learning methods to obtain stronger learning and has achieved remarkable results in the field of fault diagnosis. This paper reviews the recent research on ensemble learning from both technical and field application perspectives. The paper summarizes 87 journals in recent web of science and other academic resources, with a total of 209 papers. It summarizes 78 different ensemble learning based fault diagnosis methods, involving 18 public datasets and more than 20 different equipment systems. In detail, the paper summarizes the accuracy rates, fault classification types, fault datasets, used data signals, learners (traditional machine learning or deep learning-based learners), ensemble learning methods (bagging, boosting, stacking and other ensemble models) of these fault diagnosis models. The paper uses accuracy of fault diagnosis as the main evaluation metrics supplemented by generalization and imbalanced data processing ability to evaluate the performance of those ensemble learning methods. The discussion and evaluation of these methods lead to valuable research references in identifying and developing appropriate intelligent fault diagnosis models for various equipment. This paper also discusses and explores the technical challenges, lessons learned from the review and future development directions in the field of ensemble learning based fault diagnosis and intelligent maintenance

Artificial Intelligence Supported EV Electric Powertrain for Safety Improvement

As an environmentally friendly transport option, electric vehicles (EVs) are endowed with the characteristics of low fossil energy consumption and low pollutant emissions. In today's growing market share of EVs, the safety and reliability of the powertrain system will be directly related to the safety of human life. Reliability problems of EV powertrains may occur in any power electronic (PE) component and mechanical part, both sudden and cumulative. These faults in different locations and degrees will continuously threaten the life of drivers and pedestrians, bringing irreparable consequences. Therefore, monitoring and predicting the real-time health status of EV powertrain is a high-priority, arduous and challenging task. The purposes of this study are to develop AI-supported effective safety improvement techniques for EV powertrains. In the first place, a literature review is carried out to illustrate the up-to-date AI applications for solving condition monitoring and fault detection issues of EV powertrains, where recent case studies between conventional methods and AI-based methods in EV applications are compared and analysed. On this ground this study, then, focuses on the theories and techniques concerning this topic so as to tackle different challenges encountered in the actual applications. In detail, first, as for diagnosing the bearing system in the earlier fault period, a novel inferable deep distilled attention network is designed to detect multiple bearing faults. Second, a deep learning and simulation driven approach that combines the domain-adversarial neural network and the lumped-parameter thermal network (LPTN) is proposed for achieve IPMSM permanent magnet temperature estimation work. Finally, to ensure the use safety of the IGBT module, deep learning -based IGBT modules’ double pulse test (DPT) efficiency enhancement is proposed and achieved via multimodal fusion networks and graph convolution networks

An investigation into the prognosis of electromagnetic relays.

Electrical contacts provide a well-proven solution to switching various loads in a wide variety of applications, such as power distribution, control applications, automotive and telecommunications. However, electrical contacts are known for limited reliability due to degradation effects upon the switching contacts due to arcing and fretting. Essentially, the life of the device may be determined by the limited life of the contacts. Failure to trip, spurious tripping and contact welding can, in critical applications such as control systems for avionics and nuclear power application, cause significant costs due to downtime, as well as safety implications. Prognostics provides a way to assess the remaining useful life (RUL) of a component based on its current state of health and its anticipated future usage and operating conditions. In this thesis, the effects of contact wear on a set of electromagnetic relays used in an avionic power controller is examined, and how contact resistance combined with a prognostic approach, can be used to ascertain the RUL of the device. Two methodologies are presented, firstly a Physics based Model (PbM) of the degradation using the predicted material loss due to arc damage. Secondly a computationally efficient technique using posterior degradation data to form a state space model in real time via a Sliding Window Recursive Least Squares (SWRLS) algorithm. Health monitoring using the presented techniques can provide knowledge of impending failure in high reliability applications where the risks associated with loss-of-functionality are too high to endure. The future states of the systems has been estimated based on a Particle and Kalman-filter projection of the models via a Bayesian framework. Performance of the prognostication health management algorithm during the contacts life has been quantified using performance evaluation metrics. Model predictions have been correlated with experimental data. Prognostic metrics including Prognostic Horizon (PH), alpha-Lamda (α-λ), and Relative Accuracy have been used to assess the performance of the damage proxies and a comparison of the two models made

Universal Short-Circuit and Open-Circuit Fault Detection for an Inverter

Short-circuit and open-circuit faults of an inverter’s power device often lead to catastrophic failure of the entire system if not detected and acted upon within a few microseconds, particularly for emerging wide bandgap (WGB) power semiconductors. While a significant amount of research has been done on the fast and accurate protection and detection of short-circuit faults, there has been less success corresponding to the research on open-circuit faults. Common downfalls include protection and detection that are too application-specific, take longer than a couple of microseconds, and are not cost-efficient. This study proposes a new open-circuit fault protection and detection system integrated with a pre-existing short-circuit system called desaturation protection. First, a literature review is conducted to confirm the necessity of the new protection and detection scheme. Second, the operation principle of the newly proposed protection and detection circuitry is discussed, and design considerations are given. Third, a comprehensive case study revolving around implementing the new protection and detection system is conducted using Synopsys/Saber simulation software. Fourth, an experiment is devised and constructed to showcase the protection and detection scheme’s success, effectiveness, and adaptability in a real-world environment. Fifth, concluding remarks are given, summarizing all the work presented in this study. The results of testing the proposed system illustrate the success and reliability of the new fault protection and detection system

Industrial Applications: New Solutions for the New Era

This book reprints articles from the Special Issue "Industrial Applications: New Solutions for the New Age" published online in the open-access journal Machines (ISSN 2075-1702). This book consists of twelve published articles. This special edition belongs to the "Mechatronic and Intelligent Machines" section

Advances in Condition Monitoring, Optimization and Control for Complex Industrial Processes

The book documents 25 papers collected from the Special Issue “Advances in Condition Monitoring, Optimization and Control for Complex Industrial Processes”, highlighting recent research trends in complex industrial processes. The book aims to stimulate the research field and be of benefit to readers from both academic institutes and industrial sectors

Modelling and Detecting Faults of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors in Dynamic Operations

Paper VI is excluded from the dissertation until the article will be published.Permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) have played a key role in commercial and industrial applications, i.e. electric vehicles and wind turbines. They are popular due to their high efficiency, control simplification and large torque-to-size ratio although they are expensive. A fault will eventually occur in an operating PMSM, either by improper maintenance or wear from thermal and mechanical stresses. The most frequent PMSM faults are bearing faults, short-circuit and eccentricity. PMSM may also suffer from demagnetisation, which is unique in permanent magnet machines. Condition monitoring or fault diagnosis schemes are necessary for detecting and identifying these faults early in their incipient state, e.g. partial demagnetisation and inter-turn short circuit. Successful fault classification will ensure safe operations, speed up the maintenance process and decrease unexpected downtime and cost. The research in recent years is drawn towards fault analysis under dynamic operating conditions, i.e. variable load and speed. Most of these techniques have focused on the use of voltage, current and torque, while magnetic flux density in the air-gap or the proximity of the motor has not yet been fully capitalised. This dissertation focuses on two main research topics in modelling and diagnosis of faulty PMSM in dynamic operations. The first problem is to decrease the computational burden of modelling and analysis techniques. The first contributions are new and faster methods for computing the permeance network model and quadratic time-frequency distributions. Reducing their computational burden makes them more attractive in analysis or fault diagnosis. The second contribution is to expand the model description of a simpler model. This can be achieved through a field reconstruction model with a magnet library and a description of both magnet defects and inter-turn short circuits. The second research topic is to simplify the installation and complexity of fault diagnosis schemes in PMSM. The aim is to reduce required sensors of fault diagnosis schemes, regardless of operation profiles. Conventional methods often rely on either steady-state or predefined operation profiles, e.g. start-up. A fault diagnosis scheme robust to any speed changes is desirable since a fault can be detected regardless of operations. The final contribution is the implementation of reinforcement learning in an active learning scheme to address the imbalance dataset problem. Samples from a faulty PMSM are often initially unavailable and expensive to acquire. Reinforcement learning with a weighted reward function might balance the dataset to enhance the trained fault classifier’s performance.publishedVersio