PHM survey: implementation of signal processing methods for monitoring bearings and gearboxes

The reliability and safety of industrial equipments are one of the main objectives of companies to remain competitive in sectors that are more and more exigent in terms of cost and security. Thus, an unexpected shutdown can lead to physical injury as well as economic consequences. This paper aims to show the emergence of the Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) concept in the industry and to describe how it comes to complement the different maintenance strategies. It describes the benefits to be expected by the implementation of signal processing, diagnostic and prognostic methods in health-monitoring. More specifically, this paper provides a state of the art of existing signal processing techniques that can be used in the PHM strategy. This paper allows showing the diversity of possible techniques and choosing among them the one that will define a framework for industrials to monitor sensitive components like bearings and gearboxes

Fault detection in operating helicopter drive train components based on support vector data description

The objective of the paper is to develop a vibration-based automated procedure dealing with early detection of mechanical degradation of helicopter drive train components using Health and Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) data. An anomaly-detection method devoted to the quantification of the degree of deviation of the mechanical state of a component from its nominal condition is developed. This method is based on an Anomaly Score (AS) formed by a combination of a set of statistical features correlated with specific damages, also known as Condition Indicators (CI), thus the operational variability is implicitly included in the model through the CI correlation. The problem of fault detection is then recast as a one-class classification problem in the space spanned by a set of CI, with the aim of a global differentiation between normal and anomalous observations, respectively related to healthy and supposedly faulty components. In this paper, a procedure based on an efficient one-class classification method that does not require any assumption on the data distribution, is used. The core of such an approach is the Support Vector Data Description (SVDD), that allows an efficient data description without the need of a significant amount of statistical data. Several analyses have been carried out in order to validate the proposed procedure, using flight vibration data collected from a H135, formerly known as EC135, servicing helicopter, for which micro-pitting damage on a gear was detected by HUMS and assessed through visual inspection. The capability of the proposed approach of providing better trade-off between false alarm rates and missed detection rates with respect to individual CI and to the AS obtained assuming jointly-Gaussian-distributed CI has been also analysed

A novel classification method combining adaptive local iterative filtering with singular value decomposition for fault diagnosis

As a novel time-frequency analysis method, adaptive local iterative filtering (ALIF) can decompose the time series into several stable components which contain the main fault information. In addition, the amplitude of singular value obtained by singular value decomposition (SVD) can reflect the energy distribution. Naturally, there are certain differences in the energy produced by different faults such as the broken tooth, wearing and normal. Thus, a novel method of mechanical fault classification method based on adaptive local iterative filtering and singular value decomposition is proposed in this paper. Firstly, ALIF method decomposed the original vibration signal into a number of stable components to establish an initial feature vector matrix. Then, the singular values energy corresponding to the feature matrix is employed as a criterion to identify various faults. Compared with the conventional EMD method by simulation experiments, ALIF method has obvious superiority in solving modal aliasing, which is more conducive to the advanced analysis. In this paper, the proposed method is employed to extract the fault information of rolling bearing fault signals from Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center. To further verify the effectiveness of the method, the case study is conducted at Drivetrain Diagnostics Simulator. To further illustrate the effectiveness of the method, the results obtained by this method are compared with EMD and EEMD. The results indicated the proposed method performs better in the classification of different mechanical faulty modes

Surface reconstruction of wear in carpets by using a wavelet edge detector

Carpet manufacturers have wear labels assigned to their products by human experts who evaluate carpet samples subjected to accelerated wear in a test device. There is considerable industrial and academic interest in going from human to automated evaluation, which should be less cumbersome and more objective. In this paper, we present image analysis research on videos of carpet surfaces scanned with a 3D laser. The purpose is obtaining good depth Images for an automated system that should have a high percentage of correct assessments for a wide variety of carpets. The innovation is the use of a wavelet edge detector to obtain a more continuously defined surface shape. The evaluation is based on how well the algorithms allow a good linear ranking and a good discriminance of consecutive wear labels. The results show an improved linear ranking for most carpet types, for two carpet types the results are quite significant

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

Failure Analysis Of Rotating Equipment Using Vibration Studies And Signal Processing Techniques

This thesis focuses on failure analysis of rotating machines based on vibration analysis and signal processing techniques. The main objectives are: identifying machine’s condition, determining the faults specific response, creating methods to correct the faults, and investigating available statistical analysis methods for automatic fault detection and classification. In vibration analysis, the accelerometer data is analyzed in time and frequency domain which will determine the machine’s condition by identifying the characteristic frequencies of the faults. These fault frequencies are specific for each type of machine’s faults. Therefore, they are referred to as faults’ signatures. The most common faults of the rotating machines are unbalanced load torque, misaligned shaft, looseness, and bearing faults. The second objective is to find correction methods for rectifying the faulty situations. Therefore, correction methods for the unbalanced condition are comprehensively studied and a novel method for balancing an unbalanced rotor is developed which is based on image processing methods and results in lowering machine’s vibrations. Another objective of this research is to collect huge amount of vibration data and implement statistical data analysis methods to categorize different machine’s conditions. Therefore, principal components analysis, K-nearest neighbor, and singular value decomposition are implemented to identify different faults of the rotating machines automatically. The statistical methods have demonstrated high precision in classifying different faulty situations. Fault identification at early stages will enhance machine’s health and reduces the maintenance costs significantly. The statistical methods are easy to implement, and have disaffected the need for an expert maintenance engineer and will identify the machine’s fault automatically