Railway Axle Condition Monitoring Technique Based on Wavelet Packet Transform Features and Support Vector Machines

Railway axles are critical to the safety of railway vehicles. However, railway axle maintenance is currently based on scheduled preventive maintenance using Nondestructive Testing. The use of condition monitoring techniques would provide information about the status of the axle between periodical inspections, and it would be very valuable in the prevention of catastrophic failures. Nevertheless, in the literature, there are not many studies focusing on this area and there is a lack of experimental data. In this work, a reliable real-time condition-monitoring technique for railway axles is proposed. The technique was validated using vibration measurements obtained at the axle boxes of a full bogie installed on a rig, where four different cracked railway axles were tested. The technique is based on vibration analysis by means of the Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) energy, combined with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) diagnosis model. In all cases, it was observed that the WPT energy of the vibration signals at the first natural frequency of the axle when the wheelset is first installed (the healthy condition) increases when a crack is artificially created. An SVM diagnosis model based on the WPT energy at this frequency demonstrates good reliability, with a false alarm rate of lower than 10% and defect detection for damage occurring in more than 6.5% of the section in more than 90% of the cases. The minimum number of wheelsets required to build a general model to avoid mounting effects, among others things, is also discussed.This research was funded by the Spanish Government through the project MAQSTATUS with grantnumber DPI2015-69325-C2-1-R

30th International Conference on Condition Monitoring and Diagnostic Engineering Management (COMADEM 2017)

Proceedings of COMADEM 201

An Assessment on the Non-Invasive Methods for Condition Monitoring of Induction Motors

The ability to forecast motor mechanical faults at incipient stages is vital to reducing maintenance costs, operation downtime and safety hazards. This paper synthesized the progress in the research and development in condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of induction motors. The motor condition monitoring techniques are mainly classified into two categories that are invasive and non-invasive techniques. The invasive techniques are very basic, but they have some implementation difficulties and high cost. The non-invasive methods, namely MCSA, PVA and IPA, overcome the disadvantages associated to invasive methods. This book chapter reviews the various non-invasive condition monitoring methods for diagnosis of mechanical faults in induction motor and concludes that the instantaneous power analysis (IPA) and Park vector analysis (PVA) methods are best suitable for the diagnosis of small fault signatures associated to mechanical faults. Recommendations for the future research in these areas are also presented

Automatic Characteristic Frequency Association and All-Sideband Demodulation for Detection of a Bearing Fault of a Test Rig

International audienceThis paper proposes advanced signal-processing techniques to improve condition monitoring of operating machines. The proposed methods use the results of a blind spectrum interpretation that includes harmonic and sideband series detection. The rst contribution of this study is an algorithm for automatic association of harmonic and sideband series to characteristic fault frequencies according to a kinematic conguration. The approach proposed has the advantage of taking into account a possible slip of the rolling-element bearings. In the second part, we propose a full-band demodulation process from all sidebands that are relevant to the spectral estimation. To do so, a multi-rate ltering process in an iterative schema provides satisfying precision and stability over the targeted demodulation band, even for unsymmetrical and extremely narrow bands. After synchronous averaging, the ltered signal is demodulated for calculation of the amplitude and frequency modulation functions, and then any features that indicate faults. Finally, the proposed algorithms are validated on vibration signals measured on a test rig that was designed as part of the Eu-ropean Innovation Project KAStrion'. This rig simulates a wind turbine drive * Corresponding author Email address: [email protected] (Marcin Firla) Preprint submitted to Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing March 11, 2016 train at a smaller scale. The data show the robustness of the method for localizing and extracting a fault on the main bearing. The evolution of the proposed features is a good indicator of the fault severity

System diagnosis using a bayesian method

Today’s engineering systems have become increasingly more complex. This makes fault diagnosis a more challenging task in industry and therefore a significant amount of research has been undertaken on developing fault diagnostic methodologies. So far there already exist a variety of diagnostic methods, from qualitative to quantitative. However, no methods have considered multi-component degradation when diagnosing faults at the system level. For example, from the point a new aircraft takes off for the first time all of its components start to degrade, and yet in previous studies it is presumed that apart from the faulty component, other components in the system are operating in a healthy state. This thesis makes a contribution through the development of an experimental fuel rig to produce high quality data of multi-component degradation and a probabilistic framework based on the Bayesian method to diagnose faults in a system with considering multi-component degradation. The proposed method is implemented on the fuel rig data which illustrates the applicability of the proposed method and the diagnostic results are compared with the neural network method in order to show the capabilities and imperfections of the proposed method

On the use of context information for an improved application of data-based algorithms in condition monitoring

xi, 124 p.En el campo de la monitorización de la condición, los algoritmos basados en datos cuentan con un amplio recorrido. Desde el uso de los gráficos de control de calidad que se llevan empleando durante casi un siglo a técnicas de mayor complejidad como las redes neuronales o máquinas de soporte vectorial que se emplean para detección, diagnóstico y estimación de vida remanente de los equipos. Sin embargo, la puesta en producción de los algoritmos de monitorización requiere de un estudio exhaustivo de un factor que es a menudo obviado por otros trabajos de la literatura: el contexto. El contexto, que en este trabajo es considerado como el conjunto de factores que influencian la monitorización de un bien, tiene un gran impacto en la algoritmia de monitorización y su aplicación final. Por este motivo, es el objeto de estudio de esta tesis en la que se han analizado tres casos de uso. Se ha profundizado en sus respectivos contextos, tratando de generalizar a la problemática habitual en la monitorización de maquinaria industrial, y se ha abordado dicha problemática de monitorización de forma que solucionen el contexto en lugar de cada caso de uso. Así, el conocimiento adquirido durante el desarrollo de las soluciones puede ser transferido a otros casos de uso que cuenten con contextos similares

Predictive Maintenance of an External Gear Pump using Machine Learning Algorithms

The importance of Predictive Maintenance is critical for engineering industries, such as manufacturing, aerospace and energy. Unexpected failures cause unpredictable downtime, which can be disruptive and high costs due to reduced productivity. This forces industries to ensure the reliability of their equip-ment. In order to increase the reliability of equipment, maintenance actions, such as repairs, replacements, equipment updates, and corrective actions are employed. These actions affect the flexibility, quality of operation and manu-facturing time. It is therefore essential to plan maintenance before failure occurs.Traditional maintenance techniques rely on checks conducted routinely based on running hours of the machine. The drawback of this approach is that maintenance is sometimes performed before it is required. Therefore, conducting maintenance based on the actual condition of the equipment is the optimal solu-tion. This requires collecting real-time data on the condition of the equipment, using sensors (to detect events and send information to computer processor).Predictive Maintenance uses these types of techniques or analytics to inform about the current, and future state of the equipment. In the last decade, with the introduction of the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning (ML), cloud computing and Big Data Analytics, manufacturing industry has moved forward towards implementing Predictive Maintenance, resulting in increased uptime and quality control, optimisation of maintenance routes, improved worker safety and greater productivity.The present thesis describes a novel computational strategy of Predictive Maintenance (fault diagnosis and fault prognosis) with ML and Deep Learning applications for an FG304 series external gear pump, also known as a domino pump. In the absence of a comprehensive set of experimental data, synthetic data generation techniques are implemented for Predictive Maintenance by perturbing the frequency content of time series generated using High-Fidelity computational techniques. In addition, various types of feature extraction methods considered to extract most discriminatory informations from the data. For fault diagnosis, three types of ML classification algorithms are employed, namely Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naive Bayes (NB) algorithms. For prognosis, ML regression algorithms, such as MLP and SVM, are utilised. Although significant work has been reported by previous authors, it remains difficult to optimise the choice of hyper-parameters (important parameters whose value is used to control the learning process) for each specific ML algorithm. For instance, the type of SVM kernel function or the selection of the MLP activation function and the optimum number of hidden layers (and neurons).It is widely understood that the reliability of ML algorithms is strongly depen-dent upon the existence of a sufficiently large quantity of high-quality training data. In the present thesis, due to the unavailability of experimental data, a novel high-fidelity in-silico dataset is generated via a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) model, which has been used for the training of the underlying ML metamodel. In addition, a large number of scenarios are recreated, ranging from healthy to faulty ones (e.g. clogging, radial gap variations, axial gap variations, viscosity variations, speed variations). Furthermore, the high-fidelity dataset is re-enacted by using degradation functions to predict the remaining useful life (fault prognosis) of an external gear pump.The thesis explores and compares the performance of MLP, SVM and NB algo-rithms for fault diagnosis and MLP and SVM for fault prognosis. In order to enable fast training and reliable testing of the MLP algorithm, some predefined network architectures, like 2n neurons per hidden layer, are used to speed up the identification of the precise number of neurons (shown to be useful when the sample data set is sufficiently large). Finally, a series of benchmark tests are presented, enabling to conclude that for fault diagnosis, the use of wavelet features and a MLP algorithm can provide the best accuracy, and the MLP al-gorithm provides the best prediction results for fault prognosis. In addition, benchmark examples are simulated to demonstrate the mesh convergence for the CFD model whereas, quantification analysis and noise influence on training data are performed for ML algorithms

On the use of context information for an improved application of data-based algorithms in condition monitoring

xi, 124 p.En el campo de la monitorización de la condición, los algoritmos basados en datos cuentan con un amplio recorrido. Desde el uso de los gráficos de control de calidad que se llevan empleando durante casi un siglo a técnicas de mayor complejidad como las redes neuronales o máquinas de soporte vectorial que se emplean para detección, diagnóstico y estimación de vida remanente de los equipos. Sin embargo, la puesta en producción de los algoritmos de monitorización requiere de un estudio exhaustivo de un factor que es a menudo obviado por otros trabajos de la literatura: el contexto. El contexto, que en este trabajo es considerado como el conjunto de factores que influencian la monitorización de un bien, tiene un gran impacto en la algoritmia de monitorización y su aplicación final. Por este motivo, es el objeto de estudio de esta tesis en la que se han analizado tres casos de uso. Se ha profundizado en sus respectivos contextos, tratando de generalizar a la problemática habitual en la monitorización de maquinaria industrial, y se ha abordado dicha problemática de monitorización de forma que solucionen el contexto en lugar de cada caso de uso. Así, el conocimiento adquirido durante el desarrollo de las soluciones puede ser transferido a otros casos de uso que cuenten con contextos similares