Failure Prognosis of Wind Turbine Components

Wind energy is playing an increasingly significant role in the World\u27s energy supply mix. In North America, many utility-scale wind turbines are approaching, or are beyond the half-way point of their originally anticipated lifespan. Accurate estimation of the times to failure of major turbine components can provide wind farm owners insight into how to optimize the life and value of their farm assets. This dissertation deals with fault detection and failure prognosis of critical wind turbine sub-assemblies, including generators, blades, and bearings based on data-driven approaches. The main aim of the data-driven methods is to utilize measurement data from the system and forecast the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of faulty components accurately and efficiently. The main contributions of this dissertation are in the application of ALTA lifetime analysis to help illustrate a possible relationship between varying loads and generators reliability, a wavelet-based Probability Density Function (PDF) to effectively detecting incipient wind turbine blade failure, an adaptive Bayesian algorithm for modeling the uncertainty inherent in the bearings RUL prediction horizon, and a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for characterizing the bearing damage progression based on varying operating states to mimic a real condition in which wind turbines operate and to recognize that the damage progression is a function of the stress applied to each component using data from historical failures across three different Canadian wind farms

A Digital Triplet for Utilizing Offline Environments to Train Condition Monitoring Systems for Rolling Element Bearings

Manufacturing competitiveness is related to making a quality product while incurring the lowest costs. Unexpected downtime caused by equipment failure negatively impacts manufacturing competitiveness due to the ensuing defects and delays caused by the downtime. Manufacturers have adopted condition monitoring (CM) techniques to reduce unexpected downtime to augment maintenance strategies. The CM adoption has transitioned maintenance from Breakdown Maintenance (BM) to Condition-Based Maintenance (CbM) to anticipate impending failures and provide maintenance actions before equipment failure. CbM is the umbrella term for maintenance strategies that use condition monitoring techniques such as Preventive Maintenance (PM) and Predictive Maintenance (PdM). Preventive Maintenance involves providing periodic checks based on either time or sensory input. Predictive Maintenance utilizes continuous or periodic sensory inputs to determine the machine health state to predict the equipment failure. The overall goal of the work is to improve bearing diagnostic and prognostic predictions for equipment health by utilizing surrogate systems to generate failure data that represents production equipment failure, thereby providing training data for condition monitoring solutions without waiting for real world failure data. This research seeks to address the challenges of obtaining failure data for CM systems by incorporating a third system into monitoring strategies to create a Digital Triplet (DTr) for condition monitoring to increase the amount of possible data for condition monitoring. Bearings are a critical component in rotational manufacturing systems with wide application to other industries outside of manufacturing, such as energy and defense. The reinvented DTr system considers three components: the physical, surrogate, and digital systems. The physical system represents the real-world application in production that cannot fail. The surrogate system represents a physical component in a test system in an offline environment where data is generated to fill in gaps from data unavailable in the real-world system. The digital system is the CM system, which provides maintenance recommendations based on the ingested data from the real world and surrogate systems. In pursuing the research goal, a comprehensive bearing dataset detailing these four failure modes over different collection operating parameters was created. Subsequently, the collections occurred under different operating conditions, such as speed-varying, load-varying, and steadystate. Different frequency and time measures were used to analyze and identify differentiating criteria between the different failure classes over the differing operating conditions. These empirical observations were recreated using simulations to filter out potential outliers. The outputs of the physical model were combined with knowledge from the empirical observations to create ”spectral deltas” to augment existing bearing data and create new failure data that resemble similar frequency criteria to the original data. The primary verification occurred on a laboratory-bearing test stand. A conjecture is provided on how to scale to a larger system by analyzing a larger system from a local manufacturer. From the subsequent analysis of machine learning diagnosis and prognosis models, the original and augmented bearing data can complement each other during model training. The subsequent data substitution verifies that bearing data collected under different operating conditions and sizes can be substituted between different systems. Ostensibly, the full formulation of the digital triplet system is that bearing data generated at a smaller size can be scaled to train predictive failure models for larger bearing sizes. Future work should consider implementing this method for other systems outside of bearings, such as gears, non-rotational equipment, such as pumps, or even larger complex systems, such as computer numerically controlled machine tools or car engines. In addition, the method and process should not be restricted to only mechanical systems and could be applied to electrical systems, such as batteries. Furthermore, an investigation should consider further data-driven approximations to specific bearing characteristics related to the stiffness and damping parameters needed in modeling. A final consideration is for further investigation into the scalability quantities within the data and how to track these changes through different system levels

Asymmetric HMMs for online ball-bearing health assessments

The degradation of critical components inside large industrial assets, such as ball-bearings, has a negative impact on production facilities, reducing the availability of assets due to an unexpectedly high failure rate. Machine learning- based monitoring systems can estimate the remaining useful life (RUL) of ball-bearings, reducing the downtime by early failure detection. However, traditional approaches for predictive systems require run-to-failure (RTF) data as training data, which in real scenarios can be scarce and expensive to obtain as the expected useful life could be measured in years. Therefore, to overcome the need of RTF, we propose a new methodology based on online novelty detection and asymmetrical hidden Markov models (As-HMM) to work out the health assessment. This new methodology does not require previous RTF data and can adapt to natural degradation of mechanical components over time in data-stream and online environments. As the system is designed to work online within the electrical cabinet of machines it has to be deployed using embedded electronics. Therefore, a performance analysis of As-HMM is presented to detect the strengths and critical points of the algorithm. To validate our approach, we use real life ball-bearing data-sets and compare our methodology with other methodologies where no RTF data is needed and check the advantages in RUL prediction and health monitoring. As a result, we showcase a complete end-to-end solution from the sensor to actionable insights regarding RUL estimation towards maintenance application in real industrial environments.This study was supported partially by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the PID2019-109247GB-I00 project and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the RTC2019-006871-7 (DSTREAMS project). Also, by the H2020 IoTwins project (Distributed Digital Twins for industrial SMEs: a big-data platform) funded by the EU under the call ICT-11-2018- 2019, Grant Agreement No. 857191.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fault Detection and Diagnosis of Electric Drives Using Intelligent Machine Learning Approaches

Electric motor condition monitoring can detect anomalies in the motor performance which have the potential to result in unexpected failure and financial loss. This study examines different fault detection and diagnosis approaches in induction motors and is presented in six chapters. First, an anomaly technique or outlier detection is applied to increase the accuracy of detecting broken rotor bars. It is shown how the proposed method can significantly improve network reliability by using one-class classification technique. Then, ensemble-based anomaly detection is utilized to compare different methods in ensemble learning in detection of broken rotor bars. Finally, a deep neural network is developed to extract significant features to be used as input parameters of the network. Deep autoencoder is then employed to build an advanced model to make predictions of broken rotor bars and bearing faults occurring in induction motors with a high accuracy

Pembangunan model penentuan keperluan perumahan kajian kes: Johor Bahru, Malaysia

Perumahan merupakan satu komponen penting dalam pembangunan ekonomi di mana ia telah menjadi dasar kerajaan untuk menyediakan rumah bagi setiap rakyat. Rancangan Malaysia terdahulu telah cuba merancang bagi merealisasikan dasar ini. Walaupun anggaran keperluan perumahan dibuat di bawah Rancangan Malaysia, namun anggaran tersebut tidak membayangkan keperluan sebenar pembeli dan penyewa rumah di Malaysia. Negara-negara maju telah menggunakan pelbagai model dalam menentukan keperluan perumahan. Namun begitu, model-model tersebut tidak sesuai digunakan di Malaysia kerana data yang terhad. Kajian ini memfokuskan kepada dua objektif iaitu, mengenal pasti model dan faktor yang signifikan bagi menentukan keperluan perumahan, dan kedua menghasilkan model penentuan keperluan perumahan di Malaysia. Skop kajian ini tertumpu kepada pembeli dan penyewa rumah di Daerah Johor Bahru yang dipilih melalui kaedah pesampelan kelompok pelbagai peringkat. Data diperolehi melalui borang kaji selidik dan dianalisis menggunakan pendekatan kuantitatif. Analisis statistik deskriptif digunakan bagi menghuraikan taburan kekerapan, peratus, min, dan sisihan piawai manakala statistik inferensi iaitu ujian Korelasi Pearson dan Regresi Pelbagai digunakan untuk pembentukan model. Dengan menggunakan kaedah Enter, satu model yang signifikan dapat dihasilkan (F4,178 = 353.699 p < 0.05. Adjusted R square = .886) yang signifikan terhadap dua faktor utama iaitu demografi dan kemampuan. Model yang dihasilkan bagi kajian ini adalah General Linear Model. Model ini dapat digunakan bagi menentukan keperluan perumahan di Johor Bahru. Ia juga berfungsi sebagai alat penting dalam perancangan sektor perumahan pada masa hadapan di Malaysia