Advanced Fault Diagnosis and Health Monitoring Techniques for Complex Engineering Systems

Over the last few decades, the field of fault diagnostics and structural health management has been experiencing rapid developments. The reliability, availability, and safety of engineering systems can be significantly improved by implementing multifaceted strategies of in situ diagnostics and prognostics. With the development of intelligence algorithms, smart sensors, and advanced data collection and modeling techniques, this challenging research area has been receiving ever-increasing attention in both fundamental research and engineering applications. This has been strongly supported by the extensive applications ranging from aerospace, automotive, transport, manufacturing, and processing industries to defense and infrastructure industries

Filter-informed Spectral Graph Wavelet Networks for Multiscale Feature Extraction and Intelligent Fault Diagnosis

Intelligent fault diagnosis has been increasingly improved with the evolution of deep learning (DL) approaches. Recently, the emerging graph neural networks (GNNs) have also been introduced in the field of fault diagnosis with the goal to make better use of the inductive bias of the interdependencies between the different sensor measurements. However, there are some limitations with these GNN-based fault diagnosis methods. First, they lack the ability to realize multiscale feature extraction due to the fixed receptive field of GNNs. Secondly, they eventually encounter the over-smoothing problem with increase of model depth. Lastly, the extracted features of these GNNs are hard to understand owing to the black-box nature of GNNs. To address these issues, a filter-informed spectral graph wavelet network (SGWN) is proposed in this paper. In SGWN, the spectral graph wavelet convolutional (SGWConv) layer is established upon the spectral graph wavelet transform, which can decompose a graph signal into scaling function coefficients and spectral graph wavelet coefficients. With the help of SGWConv, SGWN is able to prevent the over-smoothing problem caused by long-range low-pass filtering, by simultaneously extracting low-pass and band-pass features. Furthermore, to speed up the computation of SGWN, the scaling kernel function and graph wavelet kernel function in SGWConv are approximated by the Chebyshev polynomials. The effectiveness of the proposed SGWN is evaluated on the collected solenoid valve dataset and aero-engine intershaft bearing dataset. The experimental results show that SGWN can outperform the comparative methods in both diagnostic accuracy and the ability to prevent over-smoothing. Moreover, its extracted features are also interpretable with domain knowledge

Novel deep cross-domain framework for fault diagnosis or rotary machinery in prognostics and health management

Improving the reliability of engineered systems is a crucial problem in many applications in various engineering fields, such as aerospace, nuclear energy, and water declination industries. This requires efficient and effective system health monitoring methods, including processing and analyzing massive machinery data to detect anomalies and performing diagnosis and prognosis. In recent years, deep learning has been a fast-growing field and has shown promising results for Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) in interpreting condition monitoring signals such as vibration, acoustic emission, and pressure due to its capacity to mine complex representations from raw data. This doctoral research provides a systematic review of state-of-the-art deep learning-based PHM frameworks, an empirical analysis on bearing fault diagnosis benchmarks, and a novel multi-source domain adaptation framework. It emphasizes the most recent trends within the field and presents the benefits and potentials of state-of-the-art deep neural networks for system health management. Besides, the limitations and challenges of the existing technologies are discussed, which leads to opportunities for future research. The empirical study of the benchmarks highlights the evaluation results of the existing models on bearing fault diagnosis benchmark datasets in terms of various performance metrics such as accuracy and training time. The result of the study is very important for comparing or testing new models. A novel multi-source domain adaptation framework for fault diagnosis of rotary machinery is also proposed, which aligns the domains in both feature-level and task-level. The proposed framework transfers the knowledge from multiple labeled source domains into a single unlabeled target domain by reducing the feature distribution discrepancy between the target domain and each source domain. Besides, the model can be easily reduced to a single-source domain adaptation problem. Also, the model can be readily updated to unsupervised domain adaptation problems in other fields such as image classification and image segmentation. Further, the proposed model is modified with a novel conditional weighting mechanism that aligns the class-conditional probability of the domains and reduces the effect of irrelevant source domain which is a critical issue in multi-source domain adaptation algorithms. The experimental verification results show the superiority of the proposed framework over state-of-the-art multi-source domain-adaptation models

Bayesian convolutional neural networks for RUL prognostics of solenoid valves with uncertainty estimations

Solenoid valves (SV) are essential components of industrial systems and therefore widely used. As they suffer from high failure rates in the field, fault prognosis of these assets plays a major role for improving their maintenance and reliability. In this work, Bayesian convolutional neural networks are used to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of SVs, by training them on the valve's current signatures. Predictive performance is further improved upon by using salient physical features obtained from an electromechanical model as the network's training input. Results show that our designed network architecture produces well-calibrated uncertainty estimations of the RUL predictive distributions, which is an important concern in prognostic decision-making

Information Theory and Its Application in Machine Condition Monitoring

Condition monitoring of machinery is one of the most important aspects of many modern industries. With the rapid advancement of science and technology, machines are becoming increasingly complex. Moreover, an exponential increase of demand is leading an increasing requirement of machine output. As a result, in most modern industries, machines have to work for 24 hours a day. All these factors are leading to the deterioration of machine health in a higher rate than before. Breakdown of the key components of a machine such as bearing, gearbox or rollers can cause a catastrophic effect both in terms of financial and human costs. In this perspective, it is important not only to detect the fault at its earliest point of inception but necessary to design the overall monitoring process, such as fault classification, fault severity assessment and remaining useful life (RUL) prediction for better planning of the maintenance schedule. Information theory is one of the pioneer contributions of modern science that has evolved into various forms and algorithms over time. Due to its ability to address the non-linearity and non-stationarity of machine health deterioration, it has become a popular choice among researchers. Information theory is an effective technique for extracting features of machines under different health conditions. In this context, this book discusses the potential applications, research results and latest developments of information theory-based condition monitoring of machineries

A Literature Review of Fault Diagnosis Based on Ensemble Learning

The accuracy of fault diagnosis is an important indicator to ensure the reliability of key equipment systems. Ensemble learning integrates different weak learning methods to obtain stronger learning and has achieved remarkable results in the field of fault diagnosis. This paper reviews the recent research on ensemble learning from both technical and field application perspectives. The paper summarizes 87 journals in recent web of science and other academic resources, with a total of 209 papers. It summarizes 78 different ensemble learning based fault diagnosis methods, involving 18 public datasets and more than 20 different equipment systems. In detail, the paper summarizes the accuracy rates, fault classification types, fault datasets, used data signals, learners (traditional machine learning or deep learning-based learners), ensemble learning methods (bagging, boosting, stacking and other ensemble models) of these fault diagnosis models. The paper uses accuracy of fault diagnosis as the main evaluation metrics supplemented by generalization and imbalanced data processing ability to evaluate the performance of those ensemble learning methods. The discussion and evaluation of these methods lead to valuable research references in identifying and developing appropriate intelligent fault diagnosis models for various equipment. This paper also discusses and explores the technical challenges, lessons learned from the review and future development directions in the field of ensemble learning based fault diagnosis and intelligent maintenance

Diagnosing Localized and Distributed Bearing Faults by Bearing Noise Signal Using Machine Learning and Kurstogram

Bearings are a common component and crucial to most rotating machinery. Their failures are the causes for more than half of the total machine failures, each with the potential to cause extreme damage, injury, and downtime. Therefore, fault detection through condition monitoring has a significant importance. Since the initial cost of standard condition monitoring techniques such as vibration signature analysis is high and has a long payback period, the condition monitoring via audio signal processing is proposed for both localized faults and distributed/ generalized roughness faults in the rolling bearing. It is not appropriate to analyze bearing faults using Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of the noise signal of bearing since localized faults are Amplitude Modulated (AM) and mixed up with background noises. Localized faults are processed using Kurstogram technique for finding the appropriate filtering band because localized faulty bearings produce impulsive signal

Challenges and opportunities of deep learning models for machinery fault detection and diagnosis: a review

In the age of industry 4.0, deep learning has attracted increasing interest for various research applications. In recent years, deep learning models have been extensively implemented in machinery fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) systems. The deep architecture's automated feature learning process offers great potential to solve problems with traditional fault detection and diagnosis (TFDD) systems. TFDD relies on manual feature selection, which requires prior knowledge of the data and is time intensive. However, the high performance of deep learning comes with challenges and costs. This paper presents a review of deep learning challenges related to machinery fault detection and diagnosis systems. The potential for future work on deep learning implementation in FDD systems is briefly discussed