An evolving approach to unsupervised and Real-Time fault detection in industrial processes

Fault detection in industrial processes is a field of application that has gaining considerable attention in the past few years, resulting in a large variety of techniques and methodologies designed to solve that problem. However, many of the approaches presented in literature require relevant amounts of prior knowledge about the process, such as mathematical models, data distribution and pre-defined parameters. In this paper, we propose the application of TEDA - Typicality and Eccentricity Data Analytics - , a fully autonomous algorithm, to the problem of fault detection in industrial processes. In order to perform fault detection, TEDA analyzes the density of each read data sample, which is calculated based on the distance between that sample and all the others read so far. TEDA is an online algorithm that learns autonomously and does not require any previous knowledge about the process nor any user-defined param-eters. Moreover, it requires minimum computational effort, enabling its use for real-time applications. The efficiency of the proposed approach is demonstrated with two different real world industrial plant data streams that provide “normal” and “faulty” data. The results shown in this paper are very encouraging when compared with traditional fault detection approaches

A comparative study of autonomous learning outlier detection methods applied to fault detection

Outlier detection is a problem that has been largely studied in the past few years due to its great applicability in real world problems (e.g. financial, social, climate, security). Fault detection in industrial processes is one of these problems. In that context, several methods have been proposed in literature to address fault detection. In this paper we propose a comparative analysis of three recently introduced outlier detection methods: RDE, RDE with Forgetting and TEDA. Such methods were applied to the data set provided in DAMADICS benchmark, a very well-known real data tool for fault detection applications. The results, however, can be extended to similar problems of the area. Therewith, in this work we compare the main features of each method as well as the results obtained with them

Modelling and Detecting Faults of Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motors in Dynamic Operations

Paper VI is excluded from the dissertation until the article will be published.Permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSMs) have played a key role in commercial and industrial applications, i.e. electric vehicles and wind turbines. They are popular due to their high efficiency, control simplification and large torque-to-size ratio although they are expensive. A fault will eventually occur in an operating PMSM, either by improper maintenance or wear from thermal and mechanical stresses. The most frequent PMSM faults are bearing faults, short-circuit and eccentricity. PMSM may also suffer from demagnetisation, which is unique in permanent magnet machines. Condition monitoring or fault diagnosis schemes are necessary for detecting and identifying these faults early in their incipient state, e.g. partial demagnetisation and inter-turn short circuit. Successful fault classification will ensure safe operations, speed up the maintenance process and decrease unexpected downtime and cost. The research in recent years is drawn towards fault analysis under dynamic operating conditions, i.e. variable load and speed. Most of these techniques have focused on the use of voltage, current and torque, while magnetic flux density in the air-gap or the proximity of the motor has not yet been fully capitalised. This dissertation focuses on two main research topics in modelling and diagnosis of faulty PMSM in dynamic operations. The first problem is to decrease the computational burden of modelling and analysis techniques. The first contributions are new and faster methods for computing the permeance network model and quadratic time-frequency distributions. Reducing their computational burden makes them more attractive in analysis or fault diagnosis. The second contribution is to expand the model description of a simpler model. This can be achieved through a field reconstruction model with a magnet library and a description of both magnet defects and inter-turn short circuits. The second research topic is to simplify the installation and complexity of fault diagnosis schemes in PMSM. The aim is to reduce required sensors of fault diagnosis schemes, regardless of operation profiles. Conventional methods often rely on either steady-state or predefined operation profiles, e.g. start-up. A fault diagnosis scheme robust to any speed changes is desirable since a fault can be detected regardless of operations. The final contribution is the implementation of reinforcement learning in an active learning scheme to address the imbalance dataset problem. Samples from a faulty PMSM are often initially unavailable and expensive to acquire. Reinforcement learning with a weighted reward function might balance the dataset to enhance the trained fault classifier’s performance.publishedVersio

Re-entry prediction of spent rocket bodies in GTO

Spent upper stages are bodies consisting of components likely to survive re-entry, for example propellant tanks. Therefore, the re-entry of upper stages might be associated with high on-ground casualty risk. This paper presents a tool for re-entry prediction of spent rocket bodies in GTO based exclusively on Two Line Element set (TLE) data. TLE analysis and filtering, spacecraft parameters estimation, and combined state and parameters estimation are the main building blocks of the tool. The performance of the tool is assessed by computing the accuracy of the re-entry prediction of 92 GTO objects, which re-entered in the past 50 years

Online fault detection based on typicality and eccentricity data analytics

Fault detection is a task of major importance in industry nowadays, since that it can considerably reduce the risk of accidents involving human lives, in addition to production and, consequently, financial losses. Therefore, fault detection systems have been largely studied in the past few years, resulting in many different methods and approaches to solve such problem. This paper presents a detailed study on fault detection on industrial processes based on the recently introduced eccentricity and typicality data analytics (TEDA) approach. TEDA is a recursive and non-parametric method, firstly proposed to the general problem of anomaly detection on data streams. It is based on the measures of data density and proximity from each read data point to the analyzed data set. TEDA is an online autonomous learning algorithm that does not require a priori knowledge about the process, is completely free of user- and problem-defined parameters, requires very low computational effort and, thus, is very suitable for real-time applications. The results further presented were generated by the application of TEDA to a pilot plant for industrial process

Cylinders extraction in non-oriented point clouds as a clustering problem

Finding geometric primitives in 3D point clouds is a fundamental task in many engineering applications such as robotics, autonomous-vehicles and automated industrial inspection. Among all solid shapes, cylinders are frequently found in a variety of scenes, comprising natural or man-made objects. Despite their ubiquitous presence, automated extraction and fitting can become challenging if performed ”in-the-wild”, when the number of primitives is unknown or the point cloud is noisy and not oriented. In this paper we pose the problem of extracting multiple cylinders in a scene by means of a Game-Theoretic inlier selection process exploiting the geometrical relations between pairs of axis candidates. First, we formulate the similarity between two possible cylinders considering the rigid motion aligning the two axes to the same line. This motion is represented with a unitary dual-quaternion so that the distance between two cylinders is induced by the length of the shortest geodesic path in SE(3). Then, a Game-Theoretical process exploits such similarity function to extract sets of primitives maximizing their inner mutual consensus. The outcome of the evolutionary process consists in a probability distribution over the sets of candidates (ie axes), which in turn is used to directly estimate the final cylinder parameters. An extensive experimental section shows that the proposed algorithm offers a high resilience to noise, since the process inherently discards inconsistent data. Compared to other methods, it does not need point normals and does not require a fine tuning of multiple parameters

Fault Detection of Inter-Turn Short-Circuited Stator Windings in Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines

Vannkraftverk leverer grønn og pålitelig energi til befolkningen i Norge, og bidrar med rundt 88 % av landets årlige strømbehov. Uventede avbrudd og stans for kraftverkene vil resultere i store økonomiske tap, samt at kraftverkene ikke får levert nødvendig kraft til nettet. Med fremveksten av Industri 4.0 benytter industriene nyskapende teknologier som skytjenester, Kunstig Intelligens (KI) og tingenes internett for å forbedre de ulike operasjonene i selskapet. Innen vannkraft-industrien vil KI-baserte systemer bli brukt som grunnlag for prediktive vedlikehold. I dag utføres det meste av vedlikeholdsarbeid i henhold til en planlagt tidsplan, og industrien ser derfor på bruk av maskinlærings-metoder for tidlig feilgjenkjenning i vannkraftverkene. Denne masteroppgaven ser på anvendelsen av maskinlærings-algoritmer for å tidlig forutsi kortslutninger i aramturviklingene i en Permanent Magnet Synkronmaskin (PMSM), ved bruk av trefaset strøm-data. Data A ble samlet inn i et internt laboratorium med en Permanent Magnet Synkrongenerator (PMSG) som hadde en implementert 4.8 % kortslutning i aramturviklingen. Dataen bestod av sunne og defekte datasett med RMSverdier for den trefasede strømmen. Data B ble hentet fra et tidligere arbeid av den samme typen PMSM med en 6.0 % kortslutning i aramturviklingen. Data B bestod av signal-verdier for den trefasede strømmen. Ved bruk av Python ble de to datasettene visuelt inspisert og forbehandlet ved hjelp av ‘Z-score’-metoden for å fjerne avvikende verdier. Denne prosessen hadde imidlertid ingen merkbar effekt på nøyaktigheten til maskinlærings-modellene. Enkel signalbehandling i tidsplanet ble anvendt på strømdataene, men klarte ikke å oppdage kortslutningsfeilen implementert på den andre faseviklingen. Statistiske parameter som gjennomsnitt, standard avvik, skjevhet, kurtose, toppverdifaktor, peak-to-peak, RMS, klaringsfaktor, formfaktor og impulsfaktor ble beregnet for alle tre fasene. En Principal Component Analysis (PCA)- algoritme ble anvendt på datasettene med de statistiske parameterne og reduserte Data A fra 18 parameter til tre Principal Components. Data B ble redusert fra 33 parametere til fire Principal Components. Før dataen kjøres i maskinlørings-modellene, ble feilindikatorer som flagger verdier utenfor den 95. persentilen av gjennomsnittsverdiene til parameterne lagt til i datasettet . Fire overvåkede maskinlærings-modeller – ‘Random Forest’, ‘Decision Trees’, ‘k-NN’ og ‘Naive Bayes’ – ble kjørt for datasettene. Random Forest- og Decision Tree-modellene hadde en tendens til å overtilpasse maskinlærings-prediksjonene på datasettene som inneholdt de statistisk parameterne. Datasettet med PCA-komponentene reduserte overtilpasningen av disse modellene og forbedret nøyaktigheten til Naive Bayes-modellen. Ettersom Naive Bayes-modellen ga varierende resultater og ble ansett som inkonsekvent, samt overtilpasnings-tendensene til Random Forest og Decision Tree, ble k-NN-modellen vurdert som den mest pålitelige av maskinlærings-modellene. De beste feilindikatorene for Data A var kurtose- og skjevhet-indikatorene, mens klaringsfaktor og formfaktor ga best nøyaktighet for Data B. Videre arbeid bør unngå bruk av data som inneholder RMS-verdier, og fokusere på bruk av signalbaserte verdier slik som i Data B. Dataprosessering og feilmerking bør også utføres i frekvensplanet, ettersom en stor svakhet ved avhandlingen er at metodikken kun ble anvendt i tidplanet. Andre ytelsesindikatorer som robusthet bør også brukes for å vurdere ytelsen til maskinlærings-modellene

Spacecraft Position Estimation and Attitude Determination using Terrestrial Illumination Matching

An algorithm to conduct spacecraft position estimation and attitude determination via terrestrial illumination matching (TIM) is presented consisting of a novel method that uses terrestrial lights as a surrogate for star fields. Although star sensors represent a highly accurate means of attitude determination with considerable spaceflight heritage, with Global Positioning System (GPS) providing position, TIM provides a potentially viable alternative in the event of star sensor or GPS malfunction or performance degradation. The research defines a catalog of terrestrial light constellations, which are then implemented within the TIM algorithm for position acquisition of a generic spacecraft bus. With the algorithm relying on terrestrial lights rather than the established standard of star fields, a series of sensitivity studies are showcased to determine performance during specified operating constraints, to include varying orbital altitude and cloud cover conditions. The pose is recovered from the matching techniques by solving the epipolar constraint equation using the Essential and Fundamental matrix, and point-to-point projection using the Homography matrix. This is used to obtain relative position change and the spacecraft\u27s attitude when there is a measurement. When there is not, both an extended and an unscented Kalman filter are applied to test continuous operation between measurements. The research is operationally promising for use with each nighttime pass, but filtering is not enough to sustain orbit determination during daytime operations