Low-cost device for fault diagnosis in bearings based on the Hilbert-Huang transform

In order to monitor the condition of machinery complex industrial environments, high-cost equipment is required for signal acquisition and processing. However, low-cost sensor nodes with high processing capability are a potential solution to improve diagnostic systems. This paper presents a low-cost device for fault diagnosis based on the vibration response in rotating machines with the implementation of the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) analysis to extract the main characteristics of the signal. HHT, used to analyze non-linear and non-stationary signals, incorporates an Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) process. Processing is carried out in an embedded system to acquire vibration response data and extract signal characteristics that allow condition monitoring. As a result of local processing in the vibratory measurement device in an embedded system, the signal decomposition is performed, enabling the detection of the characteristic failure in the bearing ring and transmitting the alarm to a hub. This eliminates the need for a central diagnostic system and reduces the total cost of the system.This work has been carried out within the framework of the Looming Factory project, reference 001-P-001643, of the RIS3CAT program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. This research has been made possible thanks to the support of the MCIA Electronic Drives and Industrial Applications Research Group of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and its collaborators.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Development of new fault detection methods for rotating machines (roller bearings)

Abstract Early fault diagnosis of roller bearings is extremely important for rotating machines, especially for high speed, automatic and precise machines. Many research efforts have been focused on fault diagnosis and detection of roller bearings, since they constitute one the most important elements of rotating machinery. In this study a combination method is proposed for early damage detection of roller bearing. Wavelet packet transform (WPT) is applied to the collected data for denoising and the resulting clean data are break-down into some elementary components called Intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using Ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method. The normalized energy of three first IMFs are used as input for Support vector machine (SVM) to recognize whether signals are sorting out from healthy or faulty bearings. Then, since there is no robust guide to determine amplitude of added noise in EEMD technique, a new Performance improved EEMD (PIEEMD) is proposed to determine the appropriate value of added noise. A novel feature extraction method is also proposed for detecting small size defect using Teager-Kaiser energy operator (TKEO). TKEO is applied to IMFs obtained to create new feature vectors as input data for one-class SVM. The results of applying the method to acceleration signals collected from an experimental bearing test rig demonstrated that the method can be successfully used for early damage detection of roller bearings. Most of the diagnostic methods that have been developed up to now can be applied for the case stationary working conditions only (constant speed and load). However, bearings often work at time-varying conditions such as wind turbine supporting bearings, mining excavator bearings, vehicles, robots and all processes with run-up and run-down transients. Damage identification for bearings working under non-stationary operating conditions, especially for early/small defects, requires the use of appropriate techniques, which are generally different from those used for the case of stationary conditions, in order to extract fault-sensitive features which are at the same time insensitive to operational condition variations. Some methods have been proposed for damage detection of bearings working under time-varying speed conditions. However, their application might increase the instrumentation cost because of providing a phase reference signal. Furthermore, some methods such as order tracking methods still can be applied when the speed variation is limited. In this study, a novel combined method based on cointegration is proposed for the development of fault features which are sensitive to the presence of defects while in the same time they are insensitive to changes in the operational conditions. It does not require any additional measurements and can identify defects even for considerable speed variations. The signals acquired during run-up condition are decomposed into IMFs using the performance improved EEMD method. Then, the cointegration method is applied to the intrinsic mode functions to extract stationary residuals. The feature vectors are created by applying the Teager-Kaiser energy operator to the obtained stationary residuals. Finally, the feature vectors of the healthy bearing signals are utilized to construct a separating hyperplane using one-class support vector machine. Eventually the proposed method was applied to vibration signals measured on an experimental bearing test rig. The results verified that the method can successfully distinguish between healthy and faulty bearings even if the shaft speed changes dramatically

Adaptive data analysis for damage detection and system identification in civil infrastructure

Time-varying structural systems are often encountered in civil engineering. As extreme events occur more frequently and severely in recent years, more structures are loaded beyond their elastic conditions and may thus experience damage in the years to come. Even if structures remain elastic, energy dissipation devices installed on structures often reveal hysteretic behaviors under earthquake loads. Therefore, it is imperative to develop and implement novel technologies that enable the identification and damage detection of time-varying systems. In this dissertation, adaptive wavelet transform (AWT) and multiple analytical mode decomposition (M-AMD) are proposed and applied to identify system properties and detect damage in structures. AWT is an optimized time-frequency representation of dynamic responses for the extraction of features. It is defined as an average of overlapped short-time wavelet transforms with time-varying wavelet parameters in order to extract time-dependent frequencies. The effectiveness of AWT is demonstrated by various analytical signals, acoustic emission and impact echo responses. M-AMD is a response decomposition method for the identification of weakly to moderately nonlinear oscillators based on vibration responses. It can be used to accurately separate the low and high frequency components of time-varying stiffness and damping coefficients in dynamic systems. The efficiency and accuracy of the proposed M-AMD are evaluated with three characteristic nonlinear oscillators and a 1/4-scale 3-story building model with frictional damping under seismic excitations. Finally, AWT-based M-AMD is applied to decompose the measured dynamic responses of a 1/20-scale cable-stayed bridge model tested on four shake tables and evaluate the progression of damage under increasing earthquake loads --Abstract, page iii

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

Structural health monitoring and bridge condition assessment

Thesis (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2016This research is mainly in the field of structural identification and model calibration, optimal sensor placement, and structural health monitoring application for large-scale structures. The ultimate goal of this study is to identify the structure behavior and evaluate the health condition by using structural health monitoring system. To achieve this goal, this research firstly established two fiber optic structural health monitoring systems for a two-span truss bridge and a five-span steel girder bridge. Secondly, this research examined the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method’s application by using the portable accelerometer system for a long steel girder bridge, and identified the accelerometer number requirements for comprehensively record bridge modal frequencies and damping. Thirdly, it developed a multi-direction model updating method which can update the bridge model by using static and dynamic measurement. Finally, this research studied the optimal static strain sensor placement and established a new method for model parameter identification and damage detection.Chapter 1: Introduction -- Chapter 2: Structural Health Monitoring of the Klehini River Bridge -- Chapter 3: Ambient Loading and Modal Parameters for the Chulitna River Bridge -- Chapter 4: Multi-direction Bridge Model Updating using Static and Dynamic Measurement -- Chapter 5: Optimal Static Strain Sensor Placement for Bridge Model Parameter Identification by using Numerical Optimization Method -- Chapter 6: Conclusions and Future Work

Trends in condition monitoring of pitch bearings

The value of wind power generation for energy sustainability in the future is undeniable. Since operation and maintenance activities take a sizeable portion of the cost associated with offshore wind turbines operation, strategies are needed to decrease this cost. One strategy, condition monitoring (CM) of wind turbines, allows the extension of useful life for several parts, which has generated great interest in the industry. One critical part are the pitch bearings, by virtue of the time and logistics involved in their maintenance tasks. As the complex working conditions of pitch bearings entail the need for diverse and innovative monitoring techniques, the classical bearing analysis techniques are notsuitable. This paper provides a literature review of several condition monitoring techniques, organized as follows: first, arranged according to the nature of the signal such as vibration, acoustic emission and others; second, arranged by relevant authors in compliance with signal nature. While little research has been found, an outline is significant for further contributions to the literature.Postprint (published version

An adaptive envelope analysis in a wireless sensor network for bearing fault diagnosis using fast kurtogram algorithm

This paper proposes a scheme to improve the performance of applying envelope analysis in a wireless sensor network for bearing fault diagnosis. The fast kurtogram is realized on the host computer for determining an optimum band-pass filter for the envelope analysis that is implemented on the wireless sensor node to extract the low frequency fault information. Therefore, the vibration signal can be monitored over the bandwidth limited wireless sensor network with both intelligence and real-time performance. Test results have proved that the diagnostic information for different bearing faults can be successfully extracted using the optimum band-pass filter

A review of physics-based models in prognostics: application to gears and bearings of rotating machinery

Health condition monitoring for rotating machinery has been developed for many years due to its potential to reduce the cost of the maintenance operations and increase availability. Covering aspects include sensors, signal processing, health assessment and decision-making. This article focuses on prognostics based on physics-based models. While the majority of the research in health condition monitoring focuses on data-driven techniques, physics-based techniques are particularly important if accuracy is a critical factor and testing is restricted. Moreover, the benefits of both approaches can be combined when data-driven and physics-based techniques are integrated. This article reviews the concept of physics-based models for prognostics. An overview of common failure modes of rotating machinery is provided along with the most relevant degradation mechanisms. The models available to represent these degradation mechanisms and their application for prognostics are discussed. Models that have not been applied to health condition monitoring, for example, wear due to metal–metal contact in hydrodynamic bearings, are also included due to its potential for health condition monitoring. The main contribution of this article is the identification of potential physics-based models for prognostics in rotating machinery

Novel Hilbert Huang transform techniques for bearing fault detection

Bearings are commonly used in rotary machinery; while up to half of machinery malfunctions could be related to bearing defects. A reliable bearing fault detection technique becomes vital to a wide array of industries to recognize an incipient bearing defect to prevent machinery performance degradation, malfunction, and unexpected breakdown. Many signal processing techniques have been suggested in literature to extract fault-related signatures for bearing fault detection, but most of them are not robust in real-world bearing health condition monitoring when signal properties vary with time. Vibration signals generated from bearings can be either stationary or nonstationary. If bearing defect-related signature is stationary, it is relatively easy to analyze using these classical data analysis techniques. However, bearing nonstationary signals are much more complex to analyze using these classical signal processing techniques, especially when slippage has occurred. Reliable fault detection still remains a challenging task, especially when bearing defect-related features are nonstationary. Two alternative approaches are proposed in this work for bearing fault detection: The first technique is based on analytical normality test, named Normalized Hilbert Haung Transform (NHHT). The second technique is based on information domain analysis, named enhanced Hilbert Haung Transform (eHHT). In the proposed NHHT technique, a novel strategy based on d’Agostino-Pearson normality analysis is suggested to demodulate feature functions and highlight feature characteristics for bearing fault detection. In the proposed eHHT, a novel strategy is proposed to enhance feature extraction based on the analysis of correlation and mutual information. The effectiveness of the proposed techniques is verified by a series of experimental tests corresponding to different bearing health conditions. Their robustness in bearing fault diagnostic is examined by the use of data sets from a different experimental setup