A Deep Learning Approach to Prognostics of Rolling Element Bearings

The use of deep learning approaches for prognostics and remaining useful life predictions have become obviously prevalent. Artificial recurrent neural networks like the long short-term memory are popularly employed for forecasting, prognostics and health management practices, and in other fields of life. As an unsupervised learning approach, the efficiency of the long short-term memory for time-series predictive purposes is quite remarkable in contrast to standard feedforward neural networks. Virtually all mechanical systems consist mostly of rotating components which are by nature, prone to degradation/failure from known and uncertain causes. As a result, condition monitoring of these rolling element bearings is necessary in order to carry out prognostics and make necessary life predictions which guide safe and cost-effective decision making. Several studies have been conducted on effective approaches and methods for accurate prognostics of rolling element bearings; however, this paper presents a case study on rolling element bearing prognostics and degradation performance using an LSTM model

Combining Deep Learning and Survival Analysis for Asset Health Management

We propose a method to integrate feature extraction and prediction as a single optimization task by stacking a three-layer model as a deep learning structure. The first layer of the deep structure is a Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model which deals with the sequential input data from a group of assets. The output of the LSTM model is followed by meanpooling, and the result is fed to the second layer. The second layer is a neural network layer, which further learns the feature representation. The output of the second layer is connected to a survival model as the third layer for predicting asset health condition. The parameters of the three-layer model are optimized together via stochastic gradient decent. The proposed method was tested on a small dataset collected from a fleet of mining haul trucks. The model resulted in the “individualized” failure probability representation for assessing the health condition of each individual asset, which well separates the in-service and failed trucks. The proposed method was also tested on a large open source hard drive dataset, and it showed promising result

Instantaneous failure mode remaining useful life estimation using non-uniformly sampled measurements from a reciprocating compressor valve failure

One of the major targets in industry is minimisation of downtime and cost, and maximisation of availability and safety, with maintenance considered a key aspect in achieving this objective. The concept of Condition Based Maintenance and Prognostics and Health Management (CBM/PHM) , which is founded on the principles of diagnostics, and prognostics, is a step towards this direction as it offers a proactive means for scheduling maintenance. Reciprocating compressors are vital components in oil and gas industry, though their maintenance cost is known to be relatively high. Compressor valves are the weakest part, being the most frequent failing component, accounting for almost half maintenance cost. To date, there has been limited information on estimating Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of reciprocating compressor in the open literature. This paper compares the prognostic performance of several methods (multiple linear regression, polynomial regression, Self-Organising Map (SOM), K-Nearest Neighbours Regression (KNNR)), in relation to their accuracy and precision, using actual valve failure data captured from an operating industrial compressor. The SOM technique is employed for the first time as a standalone tool for RUL estimation. Furthermore, two variations on estimating RUL based on SOM and KNNR respectively are proposed. Finally, an ensemble method by combining the output of all aforementioned algorithms is proposed and tested. Principal components analysis and statistical process control were implemented to create T^2 and Q metrics, which were proposed to be used as health indicators reflecting degradation processes and were employed for direct RUL estimation for the first time. It was shown that even when RUL is relatively short due to instantaneous nature of failure mode, it is feasible to perform good RUL estimates using the proposed techniques

Linear feature selection and classification using PNN and SFAM neural networks for a nearly online diagnosis of bearing naturally progressing degradations.

International audienceIn this work, an effort is made to characterize seven bearing states depending on the energy entropy of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) resulted from the Empirical Modes Decomposition (EMD).Three run-to-failure bearing vibration signals representing different defects either degraded or different failing components (roller, inner race and outer race) with healthy state lead to seven bearing states under study. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) are used for feature reduction. Then, six classification scenarios are processed via a Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) and a Simplified Fuzzy Adaptive resonance theory Map (SFAM) neural network. In other words, the three extracted feature data bases (EMD, PCA and LDA features) are processed firstly with SFAM and secondly with a combination of PNN-SFAM. The computation of classification accuracy and scattering criterion for each scenario shows that the EMD-LDA-PNN-SFAM combination is the suitable strategy for online bearing fault diagnosis. The proposed methodology reveals better generalization capability compared to previous works and it’s validated by an online bearing fault diagnosis. The proposed strategy can be applied for the decision making of several assets

Bearing remain life prediction based on weighted complex SVM models

Aiming to achieve the bearing remaining life prediction, this research proposed a method based on the weighted complex support vector machine (SVM) model. Firstly, the features are extracted by time domain, time-frequency domain method, so as the extract the original features. However, the extracted original features still with high dimensional and include superfluous information, the multi-features fusion technique principal component analysis (PCA) is used to merge the features and reduce the dimension. And the bearing degradation indicator is constructed based on the first principal component, which can indicate the bearing early failure state precisely. Then, based on the life condition indicator, the weighted complex SVM model is used to achieve the bearing remain life prediction, in this model, the particle swarm algorithm (PSO) method is used to select the SVM internal parameters, the phase space reconstruction algorithm is used to determine the structure of the SVM. Cases of actual were analyzed, the results proved the effectiveness of the methodology

Symmetry and Complexity

Symmetry and complexity are the focus of a selection of outstanding papers, ranging from pure Mathematics and Physics to Computer Science and Engineering applications. This collection is based around fundamental problems arising from different fields, but all of them have the same task, i.e. breaking the complexity by the symmetry. In particular, in this Issue, there is an interesting paper dealing with circular multilevel systems in the frequency domain, where the analysis in the frequency domain gives a simple view of the system. Searching for symmetry in fractional oscillators or the analysis of symmetrical nanotubes are also some important contributions to this Special Issue. More papers, dealing with intelligent prognostics of degradation trajectories for rotating machinery in engineering applications or the analysis of Laplacian spectra for categorical product networks, show how this subject is interdisciplinary, i.e. ranging from theory to applications. In particular, the papers by Lee, based on the dynamics of trapped solitary waves for special differential equations, demonstrate how theory can help us to handle a practical problem. In this collection of papers, although encompassing various different fields, particular attention has been paid to the common task wherein the complexity is being broken by the search for symmetry

An adaptive method for health trend prediction of rotating bearings

International audienc

Maintenance Management of Wind Turbines

“Maintenance Management of Wind Turbines” considers the main concepts and the state-of-the-art, as well as advances and case studies on this topic. Maintenance is a critical variable in industry in order to reach competitiveness. It is the most important variable, together with operations, in the wind energy industry. Therefore, the correct management of corrective, predictive and preventive politics in any wind turbine is required. The content also considers original research works that focus on content that is complementary to other sub-disciplines, such as economics, finance, marketing, decision and risk analysis, engineering, etc., in the maintenance management of wind turbines. This book focuses on real case studies. These case studies concern topics such as failure detection and diagnosis, fault trees and subdisciplines (e.g., FMECA, FMEA, etc.) Most of them link these topics with financial, schedule, resources, downtimes, etc., in order to increase productivity, profitability, maintainability, reliability, safety, availability, and reduce costs and downtime, etc., in a wind turbine. Advances in mathematics, models, computational techniques, dynamic analysis, etc., are employed in analytics in maintenance management in this book. Finally, the book considers computational techniques, dynamic analysis, probabilistic methods, and mathematical optimization techniques that are expertly blended to support the analysis of multi-criteria decision-making problems with defined constraints and requirements