Online Bearing Remaining Useful Life Prediction Based on a Novel Degradation Indicator and Convolutional Neural Networks

In industrial applications, nearly half the failures of motors are caused by the degradation of rolling element bearings (REBs). Therefore, accurately estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) for REBs are of crucial importance to ensure the reliability and safety of mechanical systems. To tackle this challenge, model-based approaches are often limited by the complexity of mathematical modeling. Conventional data-driven approaches, on the other hand, require massive efforts to extract the degradation features and construct health index. In this paper, a novel online data-driven framework is proposed to exploit the adoption of deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) in predicting the RUL of bearings. More concretely, the raw vibrations of training bearings are first processed using the Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) and a novel nonlinear degradation indicator is constructed as the label for learning. The CNN is then employed to identify the hidden pattern between the extracted degradation indicator and the vibration of training bearings, which makes it possible to estimate the degradation of the test bearings automatically. Finally, testing bearings' RULs are predicted by using a $\epsilon$-support vector regression model. The superior performance of the proposed RUL estimation framework, compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, is demonstrated through the experimental results. The generality of the proposed CNN model is also validated by transferring to bearings undergoing different operating conditions

Lifetime Based Health Indicator for Bearings using Convolitional Neural Networks

Master's thesis Renewable Energy ENE500 - University of Agder 2019Out of all the components in rotating electrical machinery, bearings have the highest failure rate. Bearingdegradation is a seemingly random process which is hard to both model and predict. Countless of con-dition based methods and algorithms have been proposed in order to accurately diagnose incipient faultsand estimate the remaining useful lifetime of bearings. These methods are often complex and hard to im-plement. In this thesis, a data-driven method of estimating a linear lifetime based health indicator (HI)using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) is proposed. The idea behind the method is to train a CNNmodel to recognize the shapes and distributions of vibration data in order to predict a HI with minimalpre-processing. Two models are presented: A CNN that takes time-series vibration data as input and aCNN that takes vibration frequency spectrum data as input. Finally, HIs are predicted on unique datasetsand their respective remaining useful lifetimes (RULs) are estimated as part of the model validation process.The results show that the models are able to recognize relevant fault features to a certain degree. However, accurate predictions have proven difficult in many cases

Uncertainty-aware deep learning for prediction of remaining useful life of mechanical systems

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction is a problem that researchers in the prognostics and health management (PHM) community have been studying for decades. Both physics-based and data-driven methods have been investigated, and in recent years, deep learning has gained significant attention. When sufficiently large and diverse datasets are available, deep neural networks can achieve state-of-the-art performance in RUL prediction for a variety of systems. However, for end users to trust the results of these models, especially as they are integrated into safety-critical systems, RUL prediction uncertainty must be captured. This work explores an approach for estimating both epistemic and heteroscedastic aleatoric uncertainties that emerge in RUL prediction deep neural networks and demonstrates that quantifying the overall impact of these uncertainties on predictions reveal valuable insight into model performance. Additionally, a study is carried out to observe the effects of RUL truth data augmentation on perceived uncertainties in the model

Survey on Deep Learning applied to predictive maintenance

Prognosis Health Monitoring (PHM) plays an increasingly important role in the management of machines and manufactured products in today’s industry, and deep learning plays an important part by establishing the optimal predictive maintenance policy. However, traditional learning methods such as unsupervised and supervised learning with standard architectures face numerous problems when exploiting existing data. Therefore, in this essay, we review the significant improvements in deep learning made by researchers over the last 3 years in solving these difficulties. We note that researchers are striving to achieve optimal performance in estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of machine health by optimizing each step from data to predictive diagnostics. Specifically, we outline the challenges at each level with the type of improvement that has been made, and we feel that this is an opportunity to try to select a state-of-the-art architecture that incorporates these changes so each researcher can compare with his or her model. In addition, post-RUL reasoning and the use of distributed computing with cloud technology is presented, which will potentially improve the classification accuracy in maintenance activities. Deep learning will undoubtedly prove to have a major impact in upgrading companies at the lowest cost in the new industrial revolution, Industry 4.0

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

Deep convolutional neural networks for Bearings failure predictionand temperature correlation

Rolling elements bearings (REBs) is one of the most sensitive components and the common failure unit in mechanical equipment. Bearings failure prognostics, which aims to achieve an effective way to handle the increasing requirements for higher reliability and in the same time reduce unnecessary costs, has been an area of extensive research. The accurate prediction of bearings Remaining Useful Life (RUL) is indispensable for safe and lifetime-optimized operations. To monitor this vital component and planning repair work, a new intelligent method based on Wavelet Packet Decomposition (WPD) and deep learning networks is proposed in this paper. Firstly, features extraction from WPD used as input data. Secondly, these selected features are fed into deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to construct the Health Indicator (HI). This study focuses on analysing the relationships such as correlations between the HI and temperature. We develop a solution for the Connectiomics contest dataset of bearings under different operating conditions and severity of defects. The performance of the proposed method is verified by four bearing data sets collected from experimental setup called “PRONOSTIA”. The results show that the health indicator obtains fairly high monotonicity and correlation values and it is beneficial to bearing life prediction. In addition, it is experimentally demonstrated that the proposed method is able to achieve better performance than a traditional neural network based method