A Low Complexity Rolling Bearing Diagnosis Technique Based on Machine Learning and Smart Preprocessing

In this work, we present a diagnosis system for rolling bearings that leverages simultaneous measurements of vibrations and machine rotation speed. Our approach combines the robustness of simple time domain methods for fault detection with the potential of machine learning techniques for fault location. This research is based on a neural network classifier, which exploits a simple and novel preprocessing algorithm specifically designed for minimizing the dependency of the classifier performance on the machine working conditions, on the bearing model and on the acquisition system set-up. The overall diagnosis system is based on light algorithms with reduced complexity and hardware resource demand and is designed to be deployed in embedded electronics. The fault diagnosis system was trained using emulated data, exploiting an ad-hoc test bench thus avoiding the problem of generating enough data, achieving an overall classifier accuracy larger than 98%. Its noteworthy ability to generalize was proven by using data emulating different working conditions and acquisition set-ups and noise levels, obtaining in all the cases accuracies greater than 97%, thereby proving in this way that the proposed system can be applied in a wide spectrum of different applications. Finally, real data from an on-line database containing vibration signals obtained in a completely different scenario are used to demonstrate the distinctive capability of the proposed system to generalize

Condition Monitoring Methods for Large, Low-speed Bearings

In all industrial production plants, well-functioning machines and systems are required for sustained and safe operation. However, asset performance degrades over time and may lead to reduced effiency, poor product quality, secondary damage to other assets or even complete failure and unplanned downtime of critical systems. Besides the potential safety hazards from machine failure, the economic consequences are large, particularly in offshore applications where repairs are difficult. This thesis focuses on large, low-speed rolling element bearings, concretized by the main swivel bearing of an offshore drilling machine. Surveys have shown that bearing failure in drilling machines is a major cause of rig downtime. Bearings have a finite lifetime, which can be estimated using formulas supplied by the bearing manufacturer. Premature failure may still occur as a result of irregularities in operating conditions and use, lubrication, mounting, contamination, or external environmental factors. On the contrary, a bearing may also exceed the expected lifetime. Compared to smaller bearings, historical failure data from large, low-speed machinery is rare. Due to the high cost of maintenance and repairs, the preferred maintenance arrangement is often condition based. Vibration measurements with accelerometers is the most common data acquisition technique. However, vibration based condition monitoring of large, low-speed bearings is challenging, due to non-stationary operating conditions, low kinetic energy and increased distance from fault to transducer. On the sensor side, this project has also investigated the usage of acoustic emission sensors for condition monitoring purposes. Roller end damage is identified as a failure mode of interest in tapered axial bearings. Early stage abrasive wear has been observed on bearings in drilling machines. The failure mode is currently only detectable upon visual inspection and potentially through wear debris in the bearing lubricant. In this thesis, multiple machine learning algorithms are developed and applied to handle the challenges of fault detection in large, low-speed bearings with little or no historical data and unknown fault signatures. The feasibility of transfer learning is demonstrated, as an approach to speed up implementation of automated fault detection systems when historical failure data is available. Variational autoencoders are proposed as a method for unsupervised dimensionality reduction and feature extraction, being useful for obtaining a health indicator with a statistical anomaly detection threshold. Data is collected from numerous experiments throughout the project. Most notably, a test was performed on a real offshore drilling machine with roller end wear in the bearing. To replicate this failure mode and aid development of condition monitoring methods, an axial bearing test rig has been designed and built as a part of the project. An overview of all experiments, methods and results are given in the thesis, with details covered in the appended papers.publishedVersio

Friction, Vibration and Dynamic Properties of Transmission System under Wear Progression

This reprint focuses on wear and fatigue analysis, the dynamic properties of coating surfaces in transmission systems, and non-destructive condition monitoring for the health management of transmission systems. Transmission systems play a vital role in various types of industrial structure, including wind turbines, vehicles, mining and material-handling equipment, offshore vessels, and aircrafts. Surface wear is an inevitable phenomenon during the service life of transmission systems (such as on gearboxes, bearings, and shafts), and wear propagation can reduce the durability of the contact coating surface. As a result, the performance of the transmission system can degrade significantly, which can cause sudden shutdown of the whole system and lead to unexpected economic loss and accidents. Therefore, to ensure adequate health management of the transmission system, it is necessary to investigate the friction, vibration, and dynamic properties of its contact coating surface and monitor its operating conditions

Vibration-based Fault Diagnostics in Wind Turbine Gearboxes Using Machine Learning

A significantly increased production of wind energy offers a path to achieve the goals of green energy policies in the United States and other countries. However, failures in wind turbines and specifically their gearboxes are higher due to their operation in unpredictable wind conditions that result in downtime and losses. Early detection of faults in wind turbines will greatly increase their reliability and commercial feasibility. Recently, data-driven fault diagnosis techniques based on deep learning have gained significant attention due to their powerful feature learning capabilities. Nonetheless, diagnosing faults in wind turbines operating under varying conditions poses a major challenge. Signal components unrelated to faults and high levels of noise obscure the signature generated by early-stage damage. To address this issue, we propose an innovative fault diagnosis framework that utilizes deep learning and leverages cyclostationary analysis of sensor data. By generating cyclic spectral coherence maps from the sensor data, we can emphasize fault-related signatures. These 2D color map representations are then used to train convolutional neural networks capable of detecting even minor faults and early-stage damages. The proposed method is evaluated using test data obtained from multibody dynamic simulations conducted under various operating conditions. The benchmark test cases, inspired by an NREL study, are successfully detected using our approach. To further enhance the accuracy of the model, subsequent studies employ Convolutional Neural Networks with Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME). This approach aids in interpreting classifier predictions and developing an interpretable classifier by focusing on a subset range of cyclic spectral coherence maps that carry the unique fault signatures. This improvement contributes to better accuracy, especially in scenarios involving multiple faults in the gearbox that need to be identified. Moreover, to address the challenge of applying this framework in practical settings, where standard deep learning techniques tend to provide inaccurate predictions for unseen faults or unusual operating conditions, we investigate fault diagnostics using a Bayesian convolutional neural network. This approach incorporates uncertainty bounds into prediction results, reducing overconfident misclassifications. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the Bayesian approach in fault diagnosis, offering valuable implications for condition monitoring in other rotating machinery applications

Development of effective gearbox fault diagnosis methodologies utilising various levels of prior knowledge

Effective fault diagnosis techniques are important to ensure that expensive assets such as wind turbines can operate reliably. Vibration condition monitoring data are rich with information pertaining to the dynamics of the rotating machines and are therefore popular for rotating machine diagnostics. However, vibration data do not only contain diagnostic information, but operating condition information as well. The performance of many conventional fault diagnosis techniques is impeded by inherent varying operating conditions encountered in machines such as wind turbines and draglines. Hence, it is not only important to utilise fault diagnosis techniques that are sensitive to faults, but the techniques should also be robust to changes in operating conditions. Much research has been conducted to address the many facets of gearbox fault diagnosis e.g. understanding the interactions of the components, the characteristics of the vibration signals and the development of good vibration analysis techniques. The aforementioned knowledge, as well as the availability of historical data, are regarded as prior knowledge (i.e. information that is available before inferring the condition of the machine) in this thesis. The available prior knowledge can be utilised to ensure that e ective gearbox fault diagnosis techniques are designed. Therefore, methodologies are proposed in this work which can utilise the available prior knowledge to e ectively perform fault diagnosis, i.e. detection, localisation and trending, under varying operating conditions. It is necessary to design di erent methodologies to accommodate the di erent kinds of historical data (e.g. healthy historical data or historical fault data) that can be encountered and the di erent signal analysis techniques that can be used. More speci cally, a methodology is developed to automatically detect localised gear damage under varying operating conditions without any historical data being available. The success of the methodology is attributed to the fact that the interaction between gear teeth in a similar condition results in data being generated which are statistically similar and this prior knowledge may be utilised. Therefore, a dissimilarity measure between the probability density functions of two teeth can be used to detect a gear tooth with localised gear damage. Three methodologies are also developed to utilise the available historical data from a healthy machine for gearbox fault diagnosis. Firstly, discrepancy analysis, a powerful novelty detection technique which has been used for gear diagnostics under varying operating conditions, is extended for bearing diagnostics under varying operating conditions. The suitability of time-frequency analysis techniques and di erent models are compared for discrepancy analysis as well. Secondly, a methodology is developed where the spectral coherence, a powerful second-order cyclostationary technique, is supplemented with healthy historical data for fault detection, localisation and trending. Lastly, a methodology is proposed which utilises narrowband feature extraction methods such as the kurtogram to extract a signal rich with novel information from a vibration signal. This is performed by attenuating the historical information in the signal. Sophisticated signal analysis techniques such as the squared envelope spectrum and the spectral coherence are also used on the novel signal to highlight the bene ts of utilising the novel signal as opposed to raw vibration signal for fault diagnosis. Even though a healthy state is the desired operating condition of rotating machines, fault data will become available during the operational life of the machine. Therefore, a methodology, centred around discrepancy analysis, is developed to utilise the available historical fault data and to accommodate fault data becoming available during the operation of the machine. In this investigation, it is recognised that the machine condition monitoring problem is in fact an open set recognition problem with continuous transitions between the healthy machine condition and the failure conditions. This is explicitly incorporated into the methodology and used to infer the condition of the gearbox in an open set recognition framework. This methodology uses a di erent approach to the conventional supervised machine learning techniques found in the literature. The methodologies are investigated on numerical and experimental datasets generated under varying operating conditions. The results indicate the bene ts of incorporating prior knowledge into the fault diagnosis process: the fault diagnosis techniques can be more robust to varying operating conditions, more sensitive to damage and easier to interpret by a non-expert. In summary, fault diagnosis techniques are more e ective when prior knowledge is utilised.Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2019.Mechanical and Aeronautical EngineeringPhDUnrestricte

A novel method for self-adaptive feature extraction using scaling crossover characteristics of signals and combining with LS-SVM for multi-fault diagnosis of gearbox

Vibration signals of defective gears are usually non-stationary and masked by noise. As a result, the feature extraction of gear fault data is always an intractable problem, especially for multi-fault couple system (two or more fault types simultaneously occur in mechanical systems). Recently, an interesting crossover characteristic of nonlinear data is used to diagnose the different severities of gear faults. Nonetheless, it lacks of self-adaptivity. Consequently, a novel method for self-adaptive feature extraction using scaling crossover characteristics of signals and combining with least square support vector machine (LS-SVM) for multi-fault diagnosis of gearbox is proposed. Firstly, detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) is introduced to analyze fractal properties and multi-scaling behaviors of vibration signal from multi-fault gearbox. The scale exponents are abrupt changed with the gradual increasing of time scales, which can be observed in the scaling-law curve. Secondly, a criterion based on a Quasi-Monte Carlo algorithm is developed to uncover optimal scaling intervals of scaling-law curve. Several different scaling regions are objectively measured in each of which a single scale exponent can be estimated. Thirdly, a three-dimensional vector, containing three scale exponents which carry definite physical meaning, is used as the feature parameter to describe the underlying dynamic mechanism hidden in gearbox vibration data. Lastly, these vectors are classified by LS-SVM. Moreover, the method of statistical parameters is exploited to classify the multi-fault vibration data which have been investigated by proposed method. The results show that the proposed method is sensitive to multi-fault vibration data of gearbox with similar fault patterns and has a better performance than other methods

A multitask-aided transfer learning-based diagnostic framework for bearings under inconsistent working conditions.

Rolling element bearings are a vital part of rotating machines and their sudden failure can result in huge economic losses as well as physical causalities. Popular bearing fault diagnosis techniques include statistical feature analysis of time, frequency, or time-frequency domain data. These engineered features are susceptible to variations under inconsistent machine operation due to the non-stationary, non-linear, and complex nature of the recorded vibration signals. To address these issues, numerous deep learning-based frameworks have been proposed in the literature. However, the logical reasoning behind crack severities and the longer training times needed to identify multiple health characteristics at the same time still pose challenges. Therefore, in this work, a diagnosis framework is proposed that uses higher-order spectral analysis and multitask learning (MTL), while also incorporating transfer learning (TL). The idea is to first preprocess the vibration signals recorded from a bearing to look for distinct patterns for a given fault type under inconsistent working conditions, e.g., variable motor speeds and loads, multiple crack severities, compound faults, and ample noise. Later, these bispectra are provided as an input to the proposed MTL-based convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify the speed and the health conditions, simultaneously. Finally, the TL-based approach is adopted to identify bearing faults in the presence of multiple crack severities. The proposed diagnostic framework is evaluated on several datasets and the experimental results are compared with several state-of-the-art diagnostic techniques to validate the superiority of the proposed model under inconsistent working conditions

Unsupervised Methods for Condition-Based Maintenance in Non-Stationary Operating Conditions

Maintenance and operation of modern dynamic engineering systems requires the use of robust maintenance strategies that are reliable under uncertainty. One such strategy is condition-based maintenance (CBM), in which maintenance actions are determined based on the current health of the system. The CBM framework integrates fault detection and forecasting in the form of degradation modeling to provide real-time reliability, as well as valuable insight towards the future health of the system. Coupled with a modern information platform such as Internet-of-Things (IoT), CBM can deliver these critical functionalities at scale. The increasingly complex design and operation of engineering systems has introduced novel problems to CBM. Characteristics of these systems - such as the unavailability of historical data, or highly dynamic operating behaviour - has rendered many existing solutions infeasible. These problems have motivated the development of new and self-sufficient - or in other words - unsupervised CBM solutions. The issue, however, is that many of the necessary methods required by such frameworks have yet to be proposed within the literature. Key gaps pertaining to the lack of suitable unsupervised approaches for the pre-processing of non-stationary vibration signals, parameter estimation for fault detection, and degradation threshold estimation, need to be addressed in order to achieve an effective implementation. The main objective of this thesis is to propose set of three novel approaches to address each of the aforementioned knowledge gaps. A non-parametric pre-processing and spectral analysis approach, termed spectral mean shift clustering (S-MSC) - which applies mean shift clustering (MSC) to the short time Fourier transform (STFT) power spectrum for simultaneous de-noising and extraction of time-varying harmonic components - is proposed for the autonomous analysis of non-stationary vibration signals. A second pre-processing approach, termed Gaussian mixture model operating state decomposition (GMM-OSD) - which uses GMMs to cluster multi-modal vibration signals by their respective, unknown operating states - is proposed to address multi-modal non-stationarity. Applied in conjunction with S-MSC, these two approaches form a robust and unsupervised pre-processing framework tailored to the types of signals found in modern engineering systems. The final approach proposed in this thesis is a degradation detection and fault prediction framework, termed the Bayesian one class support vector machine (B-OCSVM), which tackles the key knowledge gaps pertaining to unsupervised parameter and degradation threshold estimation by re-framing the traditional fault detection and degradation modeling problem as a degradation detection and fault prediction problem. Validation of the three aforementioned approaches is performed across a wide range of machinery vibration data sets and applications, including data obtained from two full-scale field pilots located at Toronto Pearson International Airport. The first of which is located on the gearbox of the LINK Automated People Mover (APM) train at Toronto Pearson International Airport; and, the second which is located on a subset of passenger boarding tunnel pre-conditioned air units (PCA) in Terminal 1 of Pearson airport. Results from validation found that the proposed pre-processing approaches and combined pre-processing framework provides a robust and computationally efficient and robust methodology for the analysis of non-stationary vibration signals in unsupervised CBM. Validation of the B-OCSVM framework showed that the proposed parameter estimation approaches enables the earlier detection of the degradation process compared to existing approaches, and the proposed degradation threshold provides a reasonable estimate of the fault manifestation point. Holistically, the approaches proposed in thesis provide a crucial step forward towards the effective implementation of unsupervised CBM in complex, modern engineering systems