A wide area system for power transmission security enhancement using a process systems approach

Imperial Users onl

Advanced techniques for aircraft bearing diagnostics

The task is the creation of a method able to diagnose and monitor bearings healthy, mainly in case of varying external conditions. The ability of the technique is verified through data acquisition on a laboratory test rig, where various operating conditions could be checked (load, speed, temperature). Signal processing techniques and data mining techniques are applied to analyse the data

Condition Monitoring Methods for Large, Low-speed Bearings

In all industrial production plants, well-functioning machines and systems are required for sustained and safe operation. However, asset performance degrades over time and may lead to reduced effiency, poor product quality, secondary damage to other assets or even complete failure and unplanned downtime of critical systems. Besides the potential safety hazards from machine failure, the economic consequences are large, particularly in offshore applications where repairs are difficult. This thesis focuses on large, low-speed rolling element bearings, concretized by the main swivel bearing of an offshore drilling machine. Surveys have shown that bearing failure in drilling machines is a major cause of rig downtime. Bearings have a finite lifetime, which can be estimated using formulas supplied by the bearing manufacturer. Premature failure may still occur as a result of irregularities in operating conditions and use, lubrication, mounting, contamination, or external environmental factors. On the contrary, a bearing may also exceed the expected lifetime. Compared to smaller bearings, historical failure data from large, low-speed machinery is rare. Due to the high cost of maintenance and repairs, the preferred maintenance arrangement is often condition based. Vibration measurements with accelerometers is the most common data acquisition technique. However, vibration based condition monitoring of large, low-speed bearings is challenging, due to non-stationary operating conditions, low kinetic energy and increased distance from fault to transducer. On the sensor side, this project has also investigated the usage of acoustic emission sensors for condition monitoring purposes. Roller end damage is identified as a failure mode of interest in tapered axial bearings. Early stage abrasive wear has been observed on bearings in drilling machines. The failure mode is currently only detectable upon visual inspection and potentially through wear debris in the bearing lubricant. In this thesis, multiple machine learning algorithms are developed and applied to handle the challenges of fault detection in large, low-speed bearings with little or no historical data and unknown fault signatures. The feasibility of transfer learning is demonstrated, as an approach to speed up implementation of automated fault detection systems when historical failure data is available. Variational autoencoders are proposed as a method for unsupervised dimensionality reduction and feature extraction, being useful for obtaining a health indicator with a statistical anomaly detection threshold. Data is collected from numerous experiments throughout the project. Most notably, a test was performed on a real offshore drilling machine with roller end wear in the bearing. To replicate this failure mode and aid development of condition monitoring methods, an axial bearing test rig has been designed and built as a part of the project. An overview of all experiments, methods and results are given in the thesis, with details covered in the appended papers.publishedVersio

Acoustic methods in real-time welding process monitoring: Application and future potential advancement

The rapid advancement of the welding technology has simultaneously increased the demand for the online monitoring system in order to control the process. Among the methods that could be possibly used to assess the weld condition, an air-borne acoustic method grasps the attention from scholars due to its ability to provide a simple, non-contact, and low-cost measurement system. However, it is still lack of resources involving this subject in an attempt to deeply understand the emitted sound behaviour during welding especially when dealing with a complete deviation of a process parameter, welding types, workpiece material as well as the noise from the surrounding. This paper reviews the application of the acoustic method in monitoring the welding process. Specifically, this review emphasized the source of both structure-borne and air-borne acoustic during the welding process and the significance of applying the acoustic method in more detail. By focusing on the liquid state welding process, the scope of discussion converged on the arc and laser welding process. In the last part of this review, the potential future advancement of this method is pointed out before the overall conclusion is made

A Fault Diagnosis System for Rotary Machinery Supported by Rolling Element Bearings

The failure of rolling element bearings is one of the foremost causes of breakdown in rotary machinery. So far, a variety of vibration-based techniques have been developed to monitor the condition of bearings; however, the role of vibration behavior is rarely considered in the proposed techniques. This thesis presents an analytical study of a healthy rotor-bearing system to gain an understanding of the different categories of bearing vibration. In this study, a two degree-of-freedom model is employed, where the contacts between the rolling elements and races are considered to be nonlinear springs. The analytical investigations confirm that the nature of the inner ring oscillation depends on the internal clearance. A fault-free bearing with a small backlash exhibits periodic behavior; however, bearings categorized as having normal clearance oscillate chaotically. The results from the numerical simulations agree with those from the experiments confirming bearing’s chaotic response at various rotational speeds. Bearing faults generate periodic impacts which affect the chaotic behavior. This effect manifests itself in the phase plane, Poincare map, and chaotic quantifiers such as the Lyapunov exponent, correlation dimension, and information entropy. These quantifiers serve as useful indices for detecting bearing defects. To compare the sensitivity and robustness of chaotic indices with those of well-accepted fault detection techniques, a comprehensive investigation is conducted. The test results demonstrate that the Correlation Dimension (CD), Normalized Information Entropy (NIE), and a proposed time-frequency index, the Maximum Approximate Coefficient of Wavelet transform (MACW), are the most reliable fault indicators. A neuro-fuzzy diagnosis system is then developed, where the strength of the aforementioned indices are integrated to provide a more robust assessment of a bearing’s health condition. Moreover, a prognosis scheme, based on the Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), in combination with a set of logical rules, is proposed for estimating the next state of a bearing’s condition. Experimental results confirm the viability of forecasting health condition under different speeds and loads

Artificial Bandwidth Extension of Speech Signals using Neural Networks

Although mobile wideband telephony has been standardized for over 15 years, many countries still do not have a nationwide network with good coverage. As a result, many cellphone calls are still downgraded to narrowband telephony. The resulting loss of quality can be reduced by artificial bandwidth extension. There has been great progress in bandwidth extension in recent years due to the use of neural networks. The topic of this thesis is the enhancement of artificial bandwidth extension using neural networks. A special focus is given to hands-free calls in a car, where the risk is high that the wideband connection is lost due to the fast movement. The bandwidth of narrowband transmission is not only reduced towards higher frequencies above 3.5 kHz but also towards lower frequencies below 300 Hz. There are already methods that estimate the low-frequency components quite well, which will therefore not be covered in this thesis. In most bandwidth extension algorithms, the narrowband signal is initially separated into a spectral envelope and an excitation signal. Both parts are then extended separately in order to finally combine both parts again. While the extension of the excitation can be implemented using simple methods without reducing the speech quality compared to wideband speech, the estimation of the spectral envelope for frequencies above 3.5 kHz is not yet solved satisfyingly. Current bandwidth extension algorithms are just able to reduce the quality loss due to narrowband transmission by a maximum of 50% in most evaluations. In this work, a modification for an existing method for excitation extension is proposed which achieves slight improvements while not generating additional computational complexity. In order to enhance the wideband envelope estimation with neural networks, two modifications of the training process are proposed. On the one hand, the loss function is extended with a discriminative part to address the different characteristics of phoneme classes. On the other hand, by using a GAN (generative adversarial network) for the training phase, a second network is added temporarily to evaluate the quality of the estimation. The neural networks that were trained are compared in subjective and objective evaluations. A final listening test addressed the scenario of a hands-free call in a car, which was simulated acoustically. The quality loss caused by the missing high frequency components could be reduced by 60% with the proposed approach.Obwohl die mobile Breitbandtelefonie bereits seit über 15 Jahren standardisiert ist, gibt es oftmals noch kein flächendeckendes Netz mit einer guten Abdeckung. Das führt dazu, dass weiterhin viele Mobilfunkgespräche auf Schmalbandtelefonie heruntergestuft werden. Der damit einhergehende Qualitätsverlust kann mit künstlicher Bandbreitenerweiterung reduziert werden. Das Thema dieser Arbeit sind Methoden zur weiteren Verbesserungen der Qualität des erweiterten Sprachsignals mithilfe neuronaler Netze. Ein besonderer Fokus liegt auf der Freisprech-Telefonie im Auto, da dabei das Risiko besonders hoch ist, dass durch die schnelle Fortbewegung die Breitbandverbindung verloren geht. Bei der Schmalbandübertragung fehlen neben den hochfrequenten Anteilen (etwa 3.5–7 kHz) auch tiefe Frequenzen unterhalb von etwa 300 Hz. Diese tieffrequenten Anteile können mit bereits vorhandenen Methoden gut geschätzt werden und sind somit nicht Teil dieser Arbeit. In vielen Algorithmen zur Bandbreitenerweiterung wird das Schmalbandsignal zu Beginn in eine spektrale Einhüllende und ein Anregungssignal aufgeteilt. Beide Anteile werden dann separat erweitert und schließlich wieder zusammengeführt. Während die Erweiterung der Anregung nahezu ohne Qualitätsverlust durch einfache Methoden umgesetzt werden kann ist die Schätzung der spektralen Einhüllenden für Frequenzen über 3.5 kHz noch nicht zufriedenstellend gelöst. Mit aktuellen Methoden können im besten Fall nur etwa 50% der durch Schmalbandübertragung reduzierten Qualität zurückgewonnen werden. Für die Anregungserweiterung wird in dieser Arbeit eine Variation vorgestellt, die leichte Verbesserungen erzielt ohne dabei einen Mehraufwand in der Berechnung zu erzeugen. Für die Schätzung der Einhüllenden des Breitbandsignals mithilfe neuronaler Netze werden zwei Änderungen am Trainingsprozess vorgeschlagen. Einerseits wird die Kostenfunktion um einen diskriminativen Anteil erweitert, der das Netz besser zwischen verschiedenen Phonemen unterscheiden lässt. Andererseits wird als Architektur ein GAN (Generative adversarial network) verwendet, wofür in der Trainingsphase ein zweites Netz verwendet wird, das die Qualität der Schätzung bewertet. Die trainierten neuronale Netze wurden in subjektiven und objektiven Tests verglichen. Ein abschließender Hörtest diente zur Evaluierung des Freisprechens im Auto, welches akustisch simuliert wurde. Der Qualitätsverlust durch Wegfallen der hohen Frequenzanteile konnte dabei mit dem vorgeschlagenen Ansatz um etwa 60% reduziert werden

Bearing prognostics using neural network under time varying conditions

Condition based maintenance (CBM) aims to schedule maintenance activities based on condition monitoring data in order to lower the overall maintenance costs and prevent unexpected failures. Effective CBM can lead to reduced downtime, less inventory, reduced maintenance costs, reliable operation and safety of entire system. The key challenge in achieving effective CBM is the accurate prediction of equipment future health condition and thus the remaining useful life. Existing prognostics methods mainly focus on constant loading conditions. However, in many applications, such as some wind turbine, transmission and engine applications, the load that the equipment is subject to changes over time. It is critical to incorporate the changing load in order to produce more accurate prognostics methods. This research is focused on the bearing prognostics, which are key mechanical components in rotary machines, supporting the entire load imposed on machines. Failure of these components can stop the operation due to machine down time, thus resulting in financial losses, which are much higher than the cost of bearing. In this thesis, an artificial neural network (ANN) based method is proposed for equipment health condition prediction under time varying conditions. The proposed method can be applied to bearing as well as other components under condition monitoring. In the proposed ANN model, in addition to using the age and condition monitoring measurement values as an inputs, a new input neuron is introduced to incorporate the varying loading condition. The output of the ANN model is accumulated life percentage, based on which the remaining useful life can be calculated once the ANN is trained. Two sets of simulated degradation data under time varying load are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ANN method, and the results show that fairly accurate prediction can be achieved using the proposed method. The other key contribution of this thesis is the experiment validation of the proposed ANN prediction method. The Bearing Prognostics Simulator, after extensive adjustment and tuning, is used to perform bearing run-to-failure test under different loading conditions. Vibration signals are collected using the data acquisition system and the Labview software. The root mean square (RMS) measurement of the vibration signals is used as the condition monitoring input for the validation of the proposed ANN prediction method. Two bearing failure histories are used to train the ANN model and test its prediction performance. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in dealing with real-world condition monitoring data for health condition prediction. The proposed model can greatly benefit industry as well as academia in condition based maintenance of rotary machines

Discrimination of PD Signal using Wavelet Transform for Insulation Diagnosis of GIS under HVDC

중전기 산업에서 부분방전의 검출 및 분석 기술은 전력설비의 상태진단 및 자산관리를 위한 가장 효과적인 방법으로 간주되어 왔다. 그러나 검출의 감도 및 정확도는 현장 노이즈에 영향을 받아 위험도 평가, 결함 판별 또는 위치 추정의 오류를 유발한다. 교류전압에서 부분방전 신호의 노이즈 제거는 활발히 연구되었지만, 최근 이슈가 되고 있는 HVDC에서 관련 연구는 미흡한 실정이다. HVDC 기술이 급속히 발전되면서 관련 전력설비 진단을 위하여, HVDC에서 부분방전 신호의 노이즈를 제거할 필요가 있다. 이들 배경으로 본 논문에서는 HVDC 가스절연구조에서 절연진단의 감도 및 정확도를 향상할 목적으로 웨이블릿 변환을 이용하여 부분방전 신호를 식별하였다. 직류에서 부분방전 신호를 발생하기 위하여 실험계를 구축하였다. HVDC는 몰드변압기, 고압 다이오드 및 커패시터로 구성된 정류회로로 발생시켰다. 가스절연구조에서 발생하는 절연결함을 모의하기 위하여 도체돌출, 외함돌출, 자유입자 및 절연물 크랙 4종의 전극계를 제작하였다. 전극계는 SF6 가스를 0.5MPa로 충진하였으며, 차폐함을 사용하여 외부 노이즈의 영향을 최소화하였다. 4종의 모의결함에서 부분방전 단일펄스를 검출하여 HVDC에서 부분방전을 분석하기 위한 웨이블릿 변환 기술을 최적화하였다. 상관계수 및 동적시간워핑 법을 이용하여 부분방전 펄스와 다양한 모웨이블릿의 유사성을 비교하였다. 결과로부터 동적시간워핑 법에 의해 선정된 모웨이블릿 bior2.6이 HVDC에서 부분방전 신호 분석에 가장 적합하였다. 최적의 문턱함수 및 문턱값을 선정하기 위하여 감쇠 지수 펄스 및 감쇠 진동 펄스를 모의하였으며, 신호-잡음비, 상관계수, 크기 변화를 비교한 결과, 중간 문턱함수-자동 문턱값이 최적의 조합으로 선정되었다. 실제 부분방전 분석 및 평가 시 단일 펄스가 아닌 펄스 시퀀스가 사용되기 때문에, 최적화된 웨이블릿 변환 기술을 이용하여 모의결함으로부터 검출된 부분방전 신호를 식별하였으며, 그 효과를 고역 통과 필터와 비교하였다. 결과로부터, 부분방전 신호 식별 시 고역통과필터에 비해 웨이블리 기술이 잡음 감소와 상관계수가 높게, 크기 변화가 낮게 나타났다. 뿐만 아니라 웨이블릿 방법은 배경 잡음, 진폭 변조 전파 장해, 비정현 잡음 및 스위칭 임펄스로 간섭된 부분방전 신호를 식별하는 데 효과적이었다. 본 논문에서 제안한 웨이블릿 변환 기술은 현장의 노이즈로부터 부분방전 신호를 성공적으로 식별하였다. 향후 HVDC에서 가스절연구조의 부분방전 검출 및 분석에 적용될 것으로 예상되며, 부분방전 검출, 위험도 평가, 결함 판별 및 위치 측정의 정확도가 향상될 수 있을 것으로 기대된다.Contents ⅰ Lists of Figures and Tables ⅲ Abstract ⅵ Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Research Background 1 1.2 Dissertation Outline 5 Chapter 2 Partial Discharge Review 7 2.1 Mechanism and Recurrence 7 2.2 Detection and Measurement 12 2.3 Analysis Methods 23 Chapter 3 Experiment and Optimization 45 3.1 Experimental Setup 45 3.2 Optimization of Wavelet Transform 49 Chapter 4 Discrimination of PD Sequences 66 4.1 DEP-type Pulse Sequence 70 4.2 DOP-type Pulse Sequence 79 Chapter 5 Conclusions 89Docto

A survey on bio-signal analysis for human-robot interaction

The use of bio-signals analysis in human-robot interaction is rapidly increasing. There is an urgent demand for it in various applications, including health care, rehabilitation, research, technology, and manufacturing. Despite several state-of-the-art bio-signals analyses in human-robot interaction (HRI) research, it is unclear which one is the best. In this paper, the following topics will be discussed: robotic systems should be given priority in the rehabilitation and aid of amputees and disabled people; second, domains of feature extraction approaches now in use, which are divided into three main sections (time, frequency, and time-frequency). The various domains will be discussed, then a discussion of each domain's benefits and drawbacks, and finally, a recommendation for a new strategy for robotic systems