Industrial process monitoring by means of recurrent neural networks and Self Organizing Maps

Industrial manufacturing plants often suffer from reliability problems during their day-to-day operations which have the potential for causing a great impact on the effectiveness and performance of the overall process and the sub-processes involved. Time-series forecasting of critical industrial signals presents itself as a way to reduce this impact by extracting knowledge regarding the internal dynamics of the process and advice any process deviations before it affects the productive process. In this paper, a novel industrial condition monitoring approach based on the combination of Self Organizing Maps for operating point codification and Recurrent Neural Networks for critical signal modeling is proposed. The combination of both methods presents a strong synergy, the information of the operating condition given by the interpretation of the maps helps the model to improve generalization, one of the drawbacks of recurrent networks, while assuring high accuracy and precision rates. Finally, the complete methodology, in terms of performance and effectiveness is validated experimentally with real data from a copper rod industrial plant.Postprint (published version

An Extender Kalman Filter-based Induction Machines Faults Detection

This paper deals with the detection and localization of electrical drives faults, especially those containing induction machines. First, the context of the study is presented and an Extended Kalman Filter is described for induction machines fault detection. Then the modeling procedure under faulty conditions is shown, and the machine diagnosis methods are developed. The proposed diagnosis approach requires only little experimental data, and more importantly it provides efficient simulation tools that allow characterizing faulty behavior.Fault detection uses signal processing techniques in known operating phases (fixed speed), considering and locating malfunctions

Time-frequency vibration analysis for the detection of motor damages caused by bearing currents

[EN] Motor failure due to bearing currents is an issue that has drawn an increasing industrial interest over recent years. Bearing currents usually appear in motors operated by variable frequency drives (VFD); these drives may lead to common voltage modes which cause currents induced in the motor shaft that are discharged through the bearings. The presence of these currents may lead to the motor bearing failure only few months after system startup. Vibration monitoring is one of the most common ways for detecting bearing damages caused by circulating currents; the evaluation of the amplitudes of well-known characteristic components in the vibration Fourier spectrum that are associated with race, ball or cage defects enables to evaluate the bearing condition and, hence, to identify an eventual damage due to bearing currents. However, the inherent constraints of the Fourier transform may complicate the detection of the progressive bearing degradation; for instance, in some cases, other frequency components may mask or be confused with bearing defect-related while, in other cases, the analysis may not be suitable due to the eventual non-stationary nature of the captured vibration signals. Moreover, the fact that this analysis implies to lose the time-dimension limits the amount of information obtained from this technique. This work proposes the use of time-frequency (T-F) transforms to analyse vibration data in motors affected by bearing currents. The experimental results obtained in real machines show that the vibration analysis via T-F tools may provide significant advantages for the detection of bearing current damages; among other, these techniques enable to visualise the progressive degradation of the bearing while providing an effective discrimination versus other components that are not related with the fault. Moreover, their application is valid regardless of the operation regime of the machine. Both factors confirm the robustness and reliability of these tools that may be an interesting alternative for detecting this type of failure in induction motors.This work was supported in part by IPES (which is a joint research laboratory between the Laboratory Ampere and Safran) and in part by the Spanish 'Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad' (MINECO) and FEDER programme in the framework of the 'Proyectos I+D del Subprograma de Generacion de Conocimiento, Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigacion Cientifica y Tecnica de Excelencia' (ref: DPI2014-52842-P)."Prudhom, A.; Antonino-Daviu, J.; Razik, H.; Climente Alarcón, V. (2017). Time-frequency vibration analysis for the detection of motor damages caused by bearing currents. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing. 84:747-762. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ymssp.2015.12.008S7477628

Recent challenges in condition monitoring of industrial electric machines

The limitations of thermal, vibration, or electrical monitoring of electric machines such as false indications, low sensitivity, and difficulty of fault interpretation have recently been exposed. This has led to a shift in the direction in research towards applying new techniques for improving the reliability of condition monitoring. With the changing environment, the purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the recent trend in the industrial demand and research activity in condition monitoring technology. The new developments in insulation testing, electrical testing, flux analysis, transient analysis, and fault prognostics are summarized. The future challenges and recommendations for future work for the new technologies are also stated to support researchers target research/development efforts according to industrial needs

Remaining useful life prediction of the ball screw system based on weighted Mahalanobis distance and an exponential model

The ball screw system is one of the crucial components of machine tools and predicting its remaining useful life (RUL) can enhance the reliability and safety of the entire machine tool and reduce maintenance costs. Although quite a few techniques have been developed for the fault diagnosis of the ball screw system, forecasting the RUL of the ball screw system is a remaining challenge. To make up for this deficiency, we present a model-based method to predict the RUL of the ball screw system, which consists of two parts: health indicator (HI) construction and RUL prediction. First, we develop a novel HI, weighted Mahalanobis distance (WDMD). Unlike the Mahalanobis distance (MD), which is constructed by fusing original features directly, the WDMD is formed with some selected features only, and the features are weighted before integration. Second, an exponential model is developed to describe the degradation path of the ball screw system. Then, the particle filtering algorithm is employed to combine the WDMD and the degradation model for state estimation and RUL prediction. The proposed approach is verified by a dataset obtained from an experimental system designed for accelerated life tests of the ball screw system. The results show that the WDMD has a more apparent deterioration trend than the MD and the proposed exponential model performs better than both the linear model and the nonlinear model in RUL prediction

Constructing a reliable health indicator for bearings using convolutional autoencoder and continuous wavelet transform

Estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of components is a crucial task to enhance reliability, safety, productivity, and to reduce maintenance cost. In general, predicting the RUL of a component includes constructing a health indicator ( ) to infer the current condition of the component, and modelling the degradation process in order to estimate the future behavior. Although many signal processing and data‐driven methods have been proposed to construct the , most of the existing methods are based on manual feature extraction techniques and require the prior knowledge of experts, or rely on a large amount of failure data. Therefore, in this study, a new data‐driven method based on the convolutional autoencoder (CAE) is presented to construct the . For this purpose, the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) technique was used to convert the raw acquired vibrational signals into a two‐dimensional image; then, the CAE model was trained by the healthy operation dataset. Finally, the Mahalanobis distance (MD) between the healthy and failure stages was measured as the . The proposed method was tested on a benchmark bearing dataset and compared with several other traditional construction models. Experimental results indicate that the constructed exhibited a monotonically increasing degradation trend and had good performance in terms of detecting incipient faults

A Bayesian network development methodology for fault analysis; case study of the automotive aftertreatment system

This paper proposes a structured methodology for generating a Bayesian network (BN) structure for an engineered system and investigates the impact of integrating engineering analysis with a data-driven methodology for fault analysis. The approach differs from the state of the art by using different initial information to build the BN structure. This method identifies the cause-and-effect relationships in a system by Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) and based on that, builds the Bayesian Network structure for the system. One of the challenges in identifying the root cause for a fault is to determine the way in which the related variable causes the fault. To deal with this challenge, the proposed methodology exploits Dynamic Fault Tree Analysis (DFTA), CLD and the correlation between variables. To demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of the presented method, it is implemented on the data-driven methodology applied to the automotive Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) system and the obtained results have been compared and discussed. The proposed methodology offers a comprehensive approach to build a BN structure for an engineered system, which can enhance the system's reliability analysis

Fault Diagnosis of Lubrication Decay in Reaction Wheels Using Temperature Estimation and Forecasting via Enhanced Adaptive Particle Filter

Reaction wheel (RW), the most common Attitude Control Systems (ACS) in satellites, are highly prone to failure. A satellite needs to be oriented in a particular direction to maneuver and accomplish its mission goals; losing the RW can lead to a complete or partial mission failure. Therefore, estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) in long and short spans can be extremely valuable. The short-period prediction allows the satellite\u27s operator to manage and prioritize mission tasks based on the RUL and increases the chances of a total mission failure becoming a partial one. Studies show that lack of proper bearing lubrication and uneven frictional torque distribution, which lead to variation in motor torque, are the leading causes of failure in RWs. Hence, this study aims to develop a three-step prognostic method for longterm RUL estimation of RWs based on the remaining lubricant for the bearing unit and potential fault in the supplementary lubrication system. In the first step of this method, the temperature of the lubricants is estimated as the non-measurable state of the system, using a proposed Adaptive particle filter (APF) with an-gular velocity and motor current of RW as the available measurements. In the second step, the estimated lubricant\u27s temperature and amount of injected lubrication in the bearing alongside the lubrication degradation model are fed to a two-step Particle Filter (PF) for online model parameter estimation. In the last step, the performance of the proposed prognostics method is evaluated by predicting the RW\u27s RUL under two fault scenarios, including excessive loss of lubrication and insufficient injection of lubrication. The results show promising performance for the proposed scheme with accuracy in estimation of degradation model\u27s parameters around 2–3% of root mean squared percentage error (RMSPE) and prediction of RUL around 0.1- 4% percentage error

Intelligent Condition Monitoring and Prognostic Methods with Applications to Dynamic Seals in the Oil & Gas Industry

The capital-intensive oil & gas industry invests billions of dollars in equipment annually and it is important to keep the equipment in top operating condition to help maintain efficient process operations and improve the rate of return by predicting failures before incidents. Digitalization has taken over the world with advances in sensor technology, wireless communication and computational capabilities, however oil & gas industry has not taken full advantage of this despite being technology centric. Dynamic seals are a vital part of reciprocating and rotary equipment such as compressor, pumps, engines, etc. and are considered most frequently failing component. Polymeric seals are increasingly complex and non-linear in behavior and have been the research of interest since 1950s. Most of the prognostic studies on seals are physics-based and requires direct estimation of different physical parameters to assess the degradation of seals, which are often difficult to obtain during operation. Another feasible approach to predict the failure is from performance related sensor data and is termed as data-driven prognostics. The offline phase of this approach is where the performance related data from the component of interest are acquired, pre-processed and artificial intelligence tools or statistical methods are used to model the degradation of a system. The developed models are then deployed online for a real-time condition monitoring. There is a lack of research on the data-driven based tools and methods for dynamic seal prognosis. The primary goal in this dissertation is to develop offline data-driven intelligent condition monitoring and prognostic methods for two types of dynamic seals used in the oil & gas industry, to avoid fatal breakdown of rotary and reciprocating equipment. Accordingly, the interest in this dissertation lies in developing models to effectively evaluate and classify the running condition of rotary seals; assess the progression of degradation from its incipient to failure and to estimate the remaining useful life (RUL) of reciprocating seals. First, a data-driven prognostic framework is developed to classify the running condition of rotary seals. An accelerated aging and testing procedure simulating rotary seal operation in oil field is developed to capture the behavior of seals through their cycle of operation until failure. The diagnostic capability of torque, leakage and vibration signal in differentiating the health states of rotary seals using experiments are compared. Since the key features that differentiate the health condition of rotary seals are unknown, an extensive feature extraction in time and frequency domain is carried out and a wrapper-based feature selection approach is used to select relevant features, with Multilayer Perceptron neural network utilized as classification technique. The proposed approach has shown that features extracted from torque and leakage lack a better discriminating power on its own, in classifying the running condition of seals throughout its service life. The classifier built using optimal set of features from torque and leakage collectively has resulted in a high classification accuracy when compared to random forest and logistic regression, even for the data collected at a different operating condition. Second, a data-driven approach to predict the degradation process of reciprocating seals based on friction force signal using a hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization - Support Vector Machine is presented. There is little to no knowledge on the feature that reflects the degradation of reciprocating seals and on the application of SVM in predicting the future running condition of polymeric components such as seals. Controlled run-to-failure experiments are designed and performed, and data collected from a dedicated experimental set-up is used to develop the proposed approach. A degradation feature with high monotonicity is used as an indicator of seal degradation. The pseudo nearest neighbor is used to determine the essential number of inputs for forecasting the future trend. The most challenging aspect of tuning parameters in SVM is framed in terms of an optimization problem aimed at minimizing the prediction error. The results indicate the effectiveness and better accuracy of the proposed approach when compared to GA-SVM and XGBoost. Finally, a deep neural network-based approach for estimating remaining useful life of reciprocating seals, using force and leakage signals is presented. Time domain and frequency domain statistical features are extracted from the measurements. An ideal prognostic feature should be well correlated with degradation time, monotonically increasing or decreasing and robust to outliers. The identified metrics namely: monotonicity, correlation and robustness are used to evaluate the goodness of extracted features. Each of the three metric carries a relative importance in the RUL estimation and a weighted linear combination of the metrics are used to rank and select the best set of prognostic features. The redundancy in the selected features is eliminated using Kelley-Gardner-Sutcliffe penalty function-based correlation-clustering algorithm to select a representative feature from each of the clusters. Finally, RUL estimation is modeled using a deep neural network model. Run-to-failure data collected from a reciprocating set-up was used to validate this approach and the findings show that the proposed approach can improve the accuracy of RUL prediction when compared to PSO-SVM and XGBoost regression. This research has important contribution and implications to rotary and reciprocating seal domain in utilizing sensors along with machine learning algorithms in assessing the health state and prognosis of seals without any direct measurements. This research has paved the way to move from a traditional fail-and-fix to predict-and-prevent approach in maintenance of seals. The findings of this research are foundational for developing an online degradation assessment platform which can remotely monitor the performance degradation of seals and provide action recommendations on maintenance decisions. This would be of great interest to customers and oil field operators to improve equipment utilization, control maintenance cost by enabling just-in-time maintenance and increase rate of return on equipment by predicting failures before incidents