Adaptive Signal Decomposition Methods for Vibration Signals of Rotating Machinery

Vibration‐based condition monitoring and fault diagnosis are becoming more common in the industry to increase machine availability and reliability. Considerable research efforts have recently been directed towards the development of adaptive signal processing methods for fault diagnosis. Two adaptive signal decomposition methods, i.e. the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and the local mean decomposition (LMD), are widely used. This chapter is intended to summarize the recent developments mostly based on the authors’ works. It aims to provide a valuable reference for readers on the processing and analysis of vibration signals collected from rotating machinery

A tutorial review on time-frequency analysis of non-stationary vibration signals with nonlinear dynamics applications

Time-frequency analysis (TFA) for mechanical vibrations in non-stationary operations is the main subject of this article, concisely written to be an introducing tutorial comparing different time-frequency techniques for non-stationary signals. The theory was carefully exposed and complemented with sample applications on mechanical vibrations and nonlinear dynamics. A particular phenomenon that is also observed in non-stationary systems is the Sommerfeld effect, which occurs due to the interaction between a non-ideal energy source and a mechanical system. An application through TFA for the characterization of the Sommerfeld effect is presented. The techniques presented in this article are applied in synthetic and experimental signals of mechanical systems, but the techniques presented can also be used in the most diverse applications and also in the numerical solution of differential equation

MODEL UPDATING AND STRUCTURAL HEALTH MONITORING OF HORIZONTAL AXIS WIND TURBINES VIA ADVANCED SPINNING FINITE ELEMENTS AND STOCHASTIC SUBSPACE IDENTIFICATION METHODS

Wind energy has been one of the most growing sectors of the nation’s renewable energy portfolio for the past decade, and the same tendency is being projected for the upcoming years given the aggressive governmental policies for the reduction of fossil fuel dependency. Great technological expectation and outstanding commercial penetration has shown the so called Horizontal Axis Wind Turbines (HAWT) technologies. Given its great acceptance, size evolution of wind turbines over time has increased exponentially. However, safety and economical concerns have emerged as a result of the newly design tendencies for massive scale wind turbine structures presenting high slenderness ratios and complex shapes, typically located in remote areas (e.g. offshore wind farms). In this regard, safety operation requires not only having first-hand information regarding actual structural dynamic conditions under aerodynamic action, but also a deep understanding of the environmental factors in which these multibody rotating structures operate. Given the cyclo-stochastic patterns of the wind loading exerting pressure on a HAWT, a probabilistic framework is appropriate to characterize the risk of failure in terms of resistance and serviceability conditions, at any given time. Furthermore, sources of uncertainty such as material imperfections, buffeting and flutter, aeroelastic damping, gyroscopic effects, turbulence, among others, have pleaded for the use of a more sophisticated mathematical framework that could properly handle all these sources of indetermination. The attainable modeling complexity that arises as a result of these characterizations demands a data-driven experimental validation methodology to calibrate and corroborate the model. For this aim, System Identification (SI) techniques offer a spectrum of well-established numerical methods appropriated for stationary, deterministic, and data-driven numerical schemes, capable of predicting actual dynamic states (eigenrealizations) of traditional time-invariant dynamic systems. As a consequence, it is proposed a modified data-driven SI metric based on the so called Subspace Realization Theory, now adapted for stochastic non-stationary and timevarying systems, as is the case of HAWT’s complex aerodynamics. Simultaneously, this investigation explores the characterization of the turbine loading and response envelopes for critical failure modes of the structural components the wind turbine is made of. In the long run, both aerodynamic framework (theoretical model) and system identification (experimental model) will be merged in a numerical engine formulated as a search algorithm for model updating, also known as Adaptive Simulated Annealing (ASA) process. This iterative engine is based on a set of function minimizations computed by a metric called Modal Assurance Criterion (MAC). In summary, the Thesis is composed of four major parts: (1) development of an analytical aerodynamic framework that predicts interacted wind-structure stochastic loads on wind turbine components; (2) development of a novel tapered-swept-corved Spinning Finite Element (SFE) that includes dampedgyroscopic effects and axial-flexural-torsional coupling; (3) a novel data-driven structural health monitoring (SHM) algorithm via stochastic subspace identification methods; and (4) a numerical search (optimization) engine based on ASA and MAC capable of updating the SFE aerodynamic model

Condition Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis of a Multi-Stage Gear Transmission Using Vibro-acoustic Signals

Gearbox condition monitoring(CM) plays a vital role in ensuring the reliability and operational efficiency of a wide range of industrial facilities such as wind turbines and helicopters. Many technologies have been investigated intensively for more accurate CM of rotating machines with using vibro-acoustic signature analysis. However, a comparison of CM performances between surface vibrations and airborne acoustics has not been carried out with the use of emerging signal processing techniques. This research has focused on a symmetric evaluation of CM performances using vibrations obtained from the surface of a multi stage gearbox housing and the airborne sound obtained remotely but close to the gearbox, in conjunction with state of the art signal processing techniques, in order to provide efficient and effective CM for gear transmissions subject to gradual and progressive deteriorations. By completing the comparative studies, this research has resulted in a number of new findings that show significant contributions to knowledge which are detailed as follows. In general, through a comprehensive review of the advancement in the subject, the research has been carried out by integrating an improved dynamic modelling, more realistic experiment verification and more advanced signal processing approaches. The improved modelling has led to an in-depth understanding of the nonlinear modulation in vibro-acoustic signals due to wear effects. Thereafter, Time Synchronous Average (TSA) and Modulation Signal Bispectrum (MSB) are identified to be the most promising signal processing methods to fulfil the evaluation because of their unique properties of simultaneous noise reduction and modulation enhancement. The more realistic tests have demonstrated that arun-to-failure test is necessary to develop effective diagnostic tools as it produces datasets from gear transmissions where deterioration naturally progresses over a long operation, rather than faults created artificially to gear systems, as is common in the majority of studies and the results unreliable. Particularly, the evaluation studies have clarified a number of key issues in the realisation of gearbox diagnostics based on TSA and MSB analysis of the vibrations from two accelerometers and acoustics from two microphones in monitoring the run-to-failure process, which showed slight gear wear of two back-to-back multiple stage helical gearboxes under variable load and speed operations. TSA analysis of vibration signals and acoustic signals allows for accurate monitoring and diagnosis results of the gradual deterioration in the lower speed transmission of both the tested gearboxes. However, it cannot give the correct indication of the higher speed stages in the second gearbox as the reference angle signal is too erroneous due to the distortion of long transmission trains. In addition, acoustic signals can indicate that there is a small determination in the higher speed transmission of the first gearbox. The MSB analysis of vibration signals and sound signals allows for the gathering of more corrective monitoring and diagnostic results of the deterioration in the four stages of transmissions of the two tested gearboxes. MSB magnitudes of both the two lower speed transmissions show monotonic increases with operational time and the increments over a longer period are in excess of three times higher than the baselines, the deteriorations are therefore regarded as severe. For the two higher speed transmissions, the MSB of vibrations and acoustics illustrates small deteriorations in the latter operating hours. Comparatively, acoustic signal based diagnostics can out-perform vibration as it can provide an early indication of deteriorations and correct diagnosis of the faults as microphones perceive a large area of dynamic responses from gearbox housing whereas accelerometers collect a very localised response which can be distorted by transmission paths. In addition, MSB analysis can out-perform conventional TSA as it maintains all diagnostic information regarding the rotating systems and can be implemented without any additional reference channels

Fault Detection in Rotating Machinery: Vibration analysis and numerical modeling

This thesis investigates vibration based machine condition monitoring and consists of two parts: bearing fault diagnosis and planetary gearbox modeling. In the first part, a new rolling element bearing diagnosis technique is introduced. Envelope analysis is one of the most advantageous methods for rolling element bearing diagnostics but finding the suitable frequency band for demodulation has been a substantial challenge for a long time. Introduction of the Spectral Kurtosis (SK) and Kurtogram mostly solved this problem but in situations where signal to noise ratio is very low or in presence of non-Gaussian noise these methods will fail. This major drawback may noticeably decrease their effectiveness and goal of this thesis is to overcome this problem. Vibration signals from rolling element bearings exhibit high levels of 2nd order cyclostationarity, especially in the presence of localized faults. A second-order cyclostationary signal is one whose autocovariance function is a periodic function of time: the proposed method, named Autogram by the authors, takes advantage of this property to enhance the conventional Kurtogram. The method computes the kurtosis of the unbiased autocorrelation (AC) of the squared envelope of the demodulated and undecimated signal, rather than the kurtosis of the filtered time signal. Moreover, to take advantage of unique features of the lower and upper portions of the AC, two modified forms of kurtosis are introduced and the resulting colormaps are called Upper and Lower Autogram. In addition, a new thresholding method is also proposed to enhance the quality of the frequency spectrum analysis. Finally, the proposed method is tested on experimental data and compared with literature results so to assess its performances in rolling element bearing diagnostics. Moreover, a second novel method for diagnosis of rolling element bearings is developed. This approach is a generalized version of the cepstrum pre-whitening (CPW) which is a simple and effective technique for bearing diagnosis. The superior performance of the proposed method has been shown on two real case data. For the first case, the method successfully extracts bearing characteristic frequencies related to two defected bearings from the acquired signal. Moreover, the defect frequency was highlighted in case two, even in presence of strong electromagnetic interference (EMI). The second part presents a newly developed lumped parameter model (LPM) of a planetary gear. Planets bearings of planetary gear sets exhibit high rate of failure; detection of these faults which may result in catastrophic breakdowns have always been challenging. Another objective of this thesis is to investigate the planetary gears vibration properties in healthy and faulty conditions. To seek this goal a previously proposed lumped parameter model (LPM) of planetary gear trains is integrated with a more comprehensive bearing model. This modified LPM includes time varying gear mesh and bearing stiffness and also nonlinear bearing stiffness due to the assumption of Hertzian contact between the rollers/balls and races. The proposed model is completely general and accepts any inner/outer race bearing defect location and profile in addition to its original capacity of modelling cracks and spalls of gears; therefore, various combinations of gears and bearing defects are also applicable. The model is exploited to attain the dynamic response of the system in order to identify and analyze localized faults signatures for inner and outer races as well as rolling elements of planets bearings. Moreover, bearing defect frequencies of inner/outer race and ball/roller and also their sidebands are discussed thoroughly. Finally, frequency response of the system for different sizes of planets bearing faults are compared and statistical diagnostic algorithms are tested to investigate faults presence and growth

Surveillance vibratoire des machines tournantes en régime non-stationnaires

In the last decades, vibration-based condition monitoring of rotating machine has gained special interest providing an efficient aid for maintenance in the industry. Nowadays, many efficient techniques are well-established, rooted on powerful tools offered in particular by the theory of cyclostationary processes. However, all these techniques rely on the assump-tion of constant— or possibly fluctuating but stationary— operating regime (i.e. speed and/or load). Unfortunately, most monitored machines used in the industry operate under nonstationary regimes in order to fulfill the task for which they have been designed. In this case, these techniques fail in analyzing the produced vibration signals. This issue, therefore, has occupied the scientific committee in the last decade and some sophisticated signal processing techniques have been conceived to deal with regime variability. But these works remain limited, dispersed and generally not supported by theoretical frameworks. The principal goal of this thesis is to partially fill in this gap on the basis of a theoretical formalization of the subject and a systematic development of new dedicated signal processing tools. In this work, the nonstationarity of the regime is confined to that of the speed— i.e. variable speed and constant load, assumed to be known a priori. In order to reach this goal, the adopted methodology consists in extending the cyclostationary framework together with its dedicated tools. We have elaborated this strategy by distinguishing two types of signatures. The first type includes deterministic waveforms known as first-order cyclostationary. The proposed solution consists in generalizing the first-order cyclostationary class to the more general first-order cyclo-non-stationary class which enfolds speed-varying deterministic signals. The second type includes random periodically-correlated waveforms known as second-order cyclostationary. Three different but complementary visions have been proposed to deal with the changes induced by the nonstationarity of the operating speed. The first one adopts an angle\time cyclostationary approach, the second one adopts an envelope-based solution and the third one adopts a (second-order) cyclo-non-stationary approach. Many tools have been conceived whose performances have been successfully tested on simulated and real vibration signals.Dans les dernières décennies, la surveillance vibratoire des machines tournantes a acquis un intérêt particulier fournissant une aide efficace pour la maintenance dans l'industrie. Aujourd'hui, de nombreuses techniques efficaces sont bien établies, ancrées sur des outils puissants offerts notamment par la théorie des processus cyclostationnaires. Cependant, toutes ces techniques reposent sur l'hypothèse d’un régime de fonctionnement (c.à.d. vitesse et/ou charge) constant ou éventuellement fluctuant d’une façon stationnaire. Malheureusement, la plupart des machines surveillées dans l'industrie opèrent sous des régimes non stationnaires afin de remplir les tâches pour lesquelles elles ont été conçues. Dans ce cas, ces techniques ne parviennent pas à analyser les signaux vibratoires produits. Ce problème a occupé la communauté scientifique dans la dernière décennie et des techniques sophistiquées de traitement du signal ont été conçues pour faire face à la variabilité du régime. Mais ces tentatives restent limitées, dispersées et généralement peu soutenues par un cadre théorique. Le principal objectif de cette thèse est de combler partiellement cette lacune sur la base d'une formalisation théorique du sujet et d’un développement systématique de nouveaux outils de traitement du signal. Dans ce travail, la non-stationnarité du régime est limitée à celle de la vitesse— c.à.d. vitesse variable et charge constante— supposée connue a priori. Afin d'atteindre cet objectif, la méthodologie adoptée consiste à étendre le cadre cyclostationnaire avec ses outils dédiés. Nous avons élaboré cette stratégie en distinguant deux types de signatures. Le premier type comprend des signaux déterministes connus comme cyclostationnaires au premier ordre. La solution proposée consiste à généraliser la classe cyclostationnaire au premier ordre à la classe cyclo-non-stationnaire au premier ordre qui comprend des signaux déterministes en vitesse variable. Le second type comprend des signaux aléatoires périodiquement corrélés connus comme cyclostationnaires au deuxième ordre. Trois visions différentes mais complémentaires ont été proposées pour traiter les variations induites par la non-stationnarité de la vitesse de fonctionnement. La première adopte une approche cyclostationnaire angle\temps, la seconde une solution basée sur l'enveloppe et la troisième une approche cyclo-non-stationnaire (au second ordre). De nombreux outils ont été conçus dont les performances ont été testées avec succès sur des signaux vibratoires réels et simulés

Numerical analysis of rotor systems with aerostatic journal Bearings

katedra: KMP; rozsah: 160Tato práce přináší soubor matematických nástrojů pro analýzu rotorových soustav uložených v aerostatických radiálních ložiskách se zvláštním zřetelem na teplotní podmínky analyzovaného systému. Testovací úloha ukázala, že vzduchový film zůstává téměř izotermický i tehdy, když je jeho průměrná teplota výrazně vyšší než teplota okolí v důsledku ztrátového výkonu při vysoké rychlosti čepu hřídele.Tato práce se také zabývá redukcí defektivních, silně gyroskopických rotorových soustav, jež je žádoucí pro přímé numerické řešení pohybových rovnic motoru uloženého v nelineárních ložiskách.This work delivers a set of mathematical tools for analysis of rotor systems supported in aerostatic journal bearings with special attention to thermal conditions of analysed system.Presented finite element thermo-hydrodynamic lubrication model of aerostatic bearings enables calculation of temperature distribution inside bearing air film and solid parts of rotor-bearing system. This eork also deals with reduction of defective, strongly gyroscopic rotor systems. Reduction of these systems is desirable for direct numerical integration of equations of motion of rotor supported by nonlinear bearings. Suitability of three feasible methods is evaluated