Online Condition Monitoring of Electric Powertrains using Machine Learning and Data Fusion

Safe and reliable operations of industrial machines are highly prioritized in industry. Typical industrial machines are complex systems, including electric motors, gearboxes and loads. A fault in critical industrial machines may lead to catastrophic failures, service interruptions and productivity losses, thus condition monitoring systems are necessary in such machines. The conventional condition monitoring or fault diagnosis systems using signal processing, time and frequency domain analysis of vibration or current signals are widely used in industry, requiring expensive and professional fault analysis team. Further, the traditional diagnosis methods mainly focus on single components in steady-state operations. Under dynamic operating conditions, the measured quantities are non-stationary, thus those methods cannot provide reliable diagnosis results for complex gearbox based powertrains, especially in multiple fault contexts. In this dissertation, four main research topics or problems in condition monitoring of gearboxes and powertrains have been identified, and novel solutions are provided based on data-driven approach. The first research problem focuses on bearing fault diagnosis at early stages and dynamic working conditions. The second problem is to increase the robustness of gearbox mixed fault diagnosis under noise conditions. Mixed fault diagnosis in variable speeds and loads has been considered as third problem. Finally, the limitation of labelled training or historical failure data in industry is identified as the main challenge for implementing data-driven algorithms. To address mentioned problems, this study aims to propose data-driven fault diagnosis schemes based on order tracking, unsupervised and supervised machine learning, and data fusion. All the proposed fault diagnosis schemes are tested with experimental data, and key features of the proposed solutions are highlighted with comparative studies.publishedVersio

A Graphical Model to Diagnose Product Defects with Partially Shuffled Equipment Data

The diagnosis of product defects is an important task in manufacturing, and machine learning-based approaches have attracted interest from both the industry and academia. A high-quality dataset is necessary to develop a machine learning model, but the manufacturing industry faces several data-collection issues including partially shuffled data, which arises when a product ID is not perfectly inferred and yields an unstable machine learning model. This paper introduces latent variables to formulate a supervised learning model that addresses the problem of partially shuffled data. The experimental results show that our graphical model deals with the shuffling of product order and can detect a defective product far more effectively than a model that ignores shuffling.This work has supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2019R1A2C1088255)

Graphical Model to Diagnose Product Defects with Partially Shuffled Equipment Data

The diagnosis of product defects is an important task in manufacturing, and machine learning-based approaches have attracted interest from both the industry and academia. A high-quality dataset is necessary to develop a machine learning model, but the manufacturing industry faces several data-collection issues including partially shuffled data, which arises when a product ID is not perfectly inferred and yields an unstable machine learning model. This paper introduces latent variables to formulate a supervised learning model that addresses the problem of partially shuffled data. The experimental results show that our graphical model deals with the shuffling of product order and can detect a defective product far more effectively than a model that ignores shuffling.This work has supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (2019R1A2C1088255)

Ensemble learning-based intelligent fault diagnosis method using feature partitioning

Diversity and fusion strategy are the key factors which affect the performance of the ensemble learning systems. In this paper, to tackle the neighborhood factor selecting difficulty of the traditional neighborhood rough set method, the wrapper feature selection algorithm based on kernel neighborhood rough set is introduced to find a set of feature subsets with high diversity, and then a base classifier selection method is proposed for constructing the ensemble learning systems. To increase the diversity, the heterogeneous ensemble learning algorithm based on the proposed base classifier selection method is designed and compared with the similar homogeneous ensemble learning algorithm. To study the effect of the fusion strategy on the final performance of the ensemble learning system, majority voting and D-S theory for fusing the outputs of base classifiers of ensemble learning system to get final decision are compared experimentally. The results on UCI data and the fault signals of rotor-bearing system show that the heterogeneous ensemble learning system with D-S fusion strategy can get the best classifying performance, and the ensemble learning system is superior to single classification system in most cases

Thermal imaging and vibration-based multisensor fault detection for rotating machinery

In order to minimize operation and maintenance costs and extend the lifetime of rotating machinery, damaging conditions and faults should be detected early and automatically. To enable this, sensor streams should continuously be monitored, processed, and interpreted. In recent years, infrared thermal imaging has gained attention for the said purpose. However, the detection capabilities of a system that uses infrared thermal imaging is limited by the modality captured by this single sensor, as is any single sensor-based system. Hence, within this paper a multisensor system is proposed that not only uses infrared thermal imaging data, but also vibration measurements for automatic condition and fault detection in rotating machinery. It is shown that by combining these two types of sensor data, several conditions/faults and combinations can be detected more accurately than when considering the sensor streams individually