Feature Evaluation for Effective Bearing Prognostics.

International audienceRolling element bearing failure is one of the foremost causes of breakdown in rotating machinery. It is not uncommon to replace a defected/used bearing with a new one that has shorter remaining useful life than the defected one. Thus, prognostics of bearing plays critical role for increased availability and reduced cost. Effective prognostics highly depend on the quality of the extracted features. Diagnostics is basically a classification problem, whereas the prognostics is the process of forecasting the future health states. The quality of the features for classification has been studied thoroughly. However, evaluation of the quality of features for prognostics is a relatively new problem. This paper presents an evaluation method for the goodness of the features for prognostics and presents results on bearings run until failure in a lab environment

Machine prognostics based on health state estimation using SVM

The ability to accurately predict the remaining useful life of machine components is critical for continuous operations in machines which can also improve productivity and enhance system safety. In condition-based maintenance (CBM), effective diagnostics and prognostics are important aspects of CBM which provide sufficient time for maintenance engineers to schedule a repair and acquire replacement components before the components finally fail. All machine components have certain characteristics of failure patterns and are subjected to degradation processes in real environments. This paper describes a technique for accurate assessment of the remnant life of machines based on prior expert knowledge embedded in closed loop prognostics systems. The technique uses Support Vector Machines (SVM) for classification of faults and evaluation of health for six stages of bearing degradation. To validate the feasibility of the proposed model, several fault historical data from High Pressure Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) pumps were analysed to obtain their failure patterns. The results obtained were very encouraging and the prediction closely matched the real life particularly at the end of term of the bearings

Major challenges in prognostics: study on benchmarking prognostic datasets

Even though prognostics has been defined to be one of the most difficult tasks in Condition Based Maintenance (CBM), many studies have reported promising results in recent years. The nature of the prognostics problem is different from diagnostics with its own challenges. There exist two major approaches to prognostics: data-driven and physics-based models. This paper aims to present the major challenges in both of these approaches by examining a number of published datasets for their suitability for analysis. Data-driven methods require sufficient samples that were run until failure whereas physics-based methods need physics of failure progression

Feature extraction and evaluation for Health Assessment and Failure prognostics.

International audienceThe estimation of Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of industrial equipments can be realized on their most critical components. Based on this assumption, the identified critical component must be monitored to track its health state during its operation. Then, the acquired data are processed to extract relevant features, which are used for RUL estimation. This paper presents an evaluation method for the goodness of the features, extracted from raw monitoring signals, for health assessment and prognostics of critical industrial components. The evaluation method is applied to several simulated datasets as well as features obtained from a particular application on bearings