Time-domain analysis of sensor-to-sensor transmissibility operators

a b s t r a c t In some applications, multiple measurements are available, but the driving input that gives rise to those outputs may be unknown. This raises the question as to whether it is possible to model the response of a subset of sensors based on the response of the remaining sensors without knowledge of the driving input. To address this issue, we develop time-domain sensor-to-sensor models that account for nonzero initial conditions. The sensor-to-sensor model is in the form of a transmissibility operator that is a rational function of the differentiation operator. The development is carried out for both SISO and MIMO transmissibility operators. These time-domain sensor-to-sensor models can be used for diagnostics and output prediction

Time-Domain Analysis of Sensor-to-Sensor Transmissibility Operators with Application to Fault Detection.

In some applications, multiple measurements are available, but the driving input that gives rise to those outputs may be unknown. This raises the question as to whether it is possible to model the response of a subset of sensors based on the response of the remaining sensors without knowledge of the driving input. To address this issue, we develop time-domain sensor-to-sensor models that account for nonzero initial conditions. The sensor-to-sensor model is in the form of a transmissibility operator, that is, a rational function of the differentiation operator. What is essential in defining the transmissibility operator is that it must be independent of both the initial condition and inputs of the underlying system, which is assumed to be time-invariant. The development is carried out for both single-input, single-output and multi-input, multi-output transmissibility operators. These time-domain sensor-to-sensor models can be used for diagnostics and output prediction. We show that transmissibility operators may be unstable, noncausal, and of unknown order. Therefore, to facilitate system identification, we consider a class of models that can approximate transmissibility operators with these properties. This class of models consists of noncausal finite impulse response models based on a truncated Laurent expansion. These models are shown to approximate the Laurent expansion inside the annulus between the asymptotically stable pole of largest modulus and the unstable pole of smallest modulus. By delaying the measured pseudo output relative to the measured pseudo input, the identified finite impulse response model is a noncausal approximation of the transmissibility operator. The causal (backward-shift) part of the Laurent expansion is asymptotically stable since all of its poles are zero, while the noncausal (forward-shift) part of the Laurent expansion captures the unstable and noncausal components of the transmissibility operator. This dissertation also develops a time-domain framework for both single-input, single-output and multi-input, multi-output transmissibilities that account for nonzero initial conditions for both force-driven and displacement-driven structures. We show that motion transmissibilities in force-driven and displacement-driven structures are equal when the locations of the forces and prescribed displacements are identical.PhDAerospace EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113623/1/khaledfj_1.pd

Aircraft Sensor Health Monitoring Based on Transmissibility Operators

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140655/1/1.g001125.pd

Study on Vibration Characteristics and Human Riding Comfort of a Special Equipment Cab

Special equipment drivers often suffered from vibration which threatened their physical and mental health. In order to study the riding comfort of a special equipment cab, a hammering experiment has been carried out on it by acceleration sensors. According to the test results, the natural frequency has been calculated which was compared with the result analysis by the finite element method. Next, the equipment operating condition test on a flat road was done. The vibration characteristics of the whole vehicle were obtained later. The results show that the cab vibration and the finite element results agree well, but the natural frequency of the cab is close to the vibration frequency of the human body. And this is not conducive to long-term operation of the drivers. In order to improve the human operational comfort, it is necessary to reduce its natural frequency during the cab structure design process. The research in this paper can provide help for the similar human-machine operation comfort study and product design

Transmissibility operators for state and output estimation in nonlinear systems

Transmissibility operators are mathematical objects that characterize the relationship between two subsets of responses of an underlying system. The importance of transmissiblity operators comes from the fact that these operators are independent on the system inputs. This work develops the transmissibility theory for nonlinear systems for the first time. The system nonlinearities are assumed to be unknown, which gives a wide range of possible engineering applications in different disciplines. Four different methods are developed to deal with these nonlinearities. The first method is by re-constructing the system nonlinearities as independent excitations on the system. This method handles the inherent unmodeled nonlinearities within the system. The second method is by designing a transmissibility-based sliding mode control. This method rejects unwanted nonlinearities such as system faults. The third method is by constructing the system as time-variant linear system, and use recursive least squares to solve it. This method can handle nonlinear systems with time-variant dynamics. The fourth method is by designing a new robust estimation technique called high-gain transmissibility (HGT) that is inspired by high-gain observers. This estimator has the ability to robustly estimate the system states in a high-gain form. The majority of modern fault detection, control systems, and robots localization depend on mathematically estimating the system states and outputs. Transmissibility-based estimation is incorporated in this work with these three theoretical applications. For fault detection, transmissibility operators are used along a set of outputs to estimate the measurements of another set of outputs. Then faults are detected by comparing the estimated and measured outputs with each other. Control approaches use the transmissibility-based estimation to construct the control signal, in which is injected back to the original system. Robots localization fuses the transmissibility-based estimation with real-time sensor measurements to minimize the error in determining the robot displacements. These three theoretical applications are applied on four different systems. The first system is Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) platoons. A CAV platoon is a network of connected autonomous vehicles that communicate together to move in a specific path with the desired velocity. Transmissibilities are proposed along with the measurements from sensors available in CAV platoons to identify transmissibility operators. This will be then developed to mixed autonomous and human-driven vehicle platoons. Besides the wide range of physical and cyber faults in such systems, this is also motivated by the fact that on-road human-drivers’ behaviour is unknown and difficult to be predicted. Transmissibility operators are used here to handle both cyber-physical faults as well as the human-drivers’ behaviour. The platoon faults are then proposed to be mitigated using a transmissibility-based sliding mode controller. Moreover, transmissibilities are integrated with Kalman filter to localize CAV platoons while operating under non-Gaussian environment as unknown nonlinearities. The second system is a multi-actuator micro positioning system that is used in the semi-conductors industry. Transmissibility operators are applied on this system for fault detection and fault-tolerant control. Fault detection is represented in applying the proposed developments to actuator fault detection. Some of the most common actuator faults such as actuator loss of effectiveness and fatigue crack in the connection hinges will be considered. Transmissibilities then will be used for fault detection without knowledge of the dynamics of the system or the excitation that acts on the system. Next, a transmissibility-based sliding mode control will be implemented to mitigate common actuator faults in multi-actuator systems. The third system is flexible structures subjected to unknown and random excitations. Structures used in applications subjected to turbulent fluid flow such as aerospace and underwater applications are subjected to random excitations distributed along the structure. Transmissibility operators are used for the purpose of structural fault detection and localization during the system operation. The fourth system is robotic manipulators with bounded nonlinearities and time-variant parameters. Both parameter variation and system nonlinearities are considered to be unknown. Transmissibility operators are integrated with Recursive Least Squares (RLS) to overcome the unknown variant parameters. RLS identifies transmissibilities used in the structure of noncausal FIR (Finite Impulse Response) models. While parameter variation can be treated as system nonlinearities, the RLS algorithm is used to optimize what time-variant dynamics to include in the transmissibility operator and what dynamics to push to the system nonlinearities over time. The identified transmissibilities are then used for the purpose of fault detection in an experimental robotic arm with variant picked mass

Vibration isolation under isolator-structure interaction

This thesis analyses a general case of the vibration isolation (VI) problem, considering both a rigid and non-rigid supporting structures. The aim is to study changes on the behaviour of both systems isolators and supporting structure when the interaction phenomenon between them is considered. The influence of the VI task on the base response is evaluated. In addition, the effect of the base dynamics on the the VI and alignment problem is studied. The novel contribution to the knowledge of this thesis is formulation of a novel VI approach, which facilitates a holistic analysis of the problem considering all the systems involved on it. This approach is valid for any number of isolators and for any type of base structure. Moreover, different control objectives can be easily defined; evaluation of the interaction phenomenon on both the platform and base response for different VI techniques; demonstration of the importance of the isolator damping ratio on the influence that the VI task has on the base response; evaluation of the effects of the supporting structure dynamics on the VI and alignment problem when multiple isolators are involved; analysis of the Multiple-Input-Multiple-Ouput (MIMO) control strategy by comparison with the Single-Input-Single-Output (SISO) control strategy. This comparative has been made for the VI and alignment problem of multiple isolators on a non-rigid supporting structure and includes analysis of the effectiveness of the Coral Reefs Optimization algorithms to find nearly-optimal control gains in VI and alignment problems. Through the investigation made for this thesis, a number of significant results have been reached, which show the importance of the supporting structure dynamics on the VI and alignment task. Moreover, the interaction phenomenon, and its consequence on the base response, has been investigated experimentally. The results derived from this thesis conclude that, for most scenarios, the dynamics of the base affects the VI task. Also, the active VI (AVI) technique shows a greater influence on the base response than passive VI (PVI) technique, for most cases. It has been observed that the use of AVI technique can additionally be oriented to control vibrations of the supporting structure, while the VI task is developed. Significant differences have been found when multiple isolators are involved in the same task for the alignment and VI problem, depending on whether or not the dynamics of the base are considered. The best set of control gains for the rigid-support case (which lead to maximum damping ratio) differ from those obtained when the supporting structure is considered as a flexible system, for different cases analysed in this thesis. The MIMO control strategy has shown great improvement with respect to the use of the SISO control strategy. Also, the Coral Reefs Optimization algorithms have been demonstrated to be a suitable tool to find nearly-optimal solutions for this type of problems

In-belt vibration monitoring of conveyor belt idler bearings by using wavelet package decomposition and artificial intelligence

Visual and acoustic methods are commonly used to identify faulty or failing idler bearings but these methods can become tedious and time consuming in practice. While vibration monitoring might look like an obvious choice to explore, the instrumentation of individual idler bearings would be prohibitively expensive. The potential for using an accelerometer that moves with the belt while tracking the condition of all bearings encountered along the way is therefore potentially interesting. This possibility is explored in this work on a laboratory scale test rig. Wavelet package decomposition is used to extract the bearing features and present it to an artificial neural network and support vector machine to identify and classify faulty idler bearings. The system could not only identify faulty bearings but also classify the faults accurately.http://www.inderscience.com/jhome.php?jcode=IJMME2022-05-06hj2021Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineerin

Vibration-based damage localisation: Impulse response identification and model updating methods

Structural health monitoring has gained more and more interest over the recent decades. As the technology has matured and monitoring systems are employed commercially, the development of more powerful and precise methods is the logical next step in this field. Especially vibration sensor networks with few measurement points combined with utilisation of ambient vibration sources are attractive for practical applications, as this approach promises to be cost-effective while requiring minimal modification to the monitored structures. Since efficient methods for damage detection have already been developed for such sensor networks, the research focus shifts towards extracting more information from the measurement data, in particular to the localisation and quantification of damage. Two main concepts have produced promising results for damage localisation. The first approach involves a mechanical model of the structure, which is used in a model updating scheme to find the damaged areas of the structure. Second, there is a purely data-driven approach, which relies on residuals of vibration estimations to find regions where damage is probable. While much research has been conducted following these two concepts, different approaches are rarely directly compared using the same data sets. Therefore, this thesis presents advanced methods for vibration-based damage localisation using model updating as well as a data-driven method and provides a direct comparison using the same vibration measurement data. The model updating approach presented in this thesis relies on multiobjective optimisation. Hence, the applied numerical optimisation algorithms are presented first. On this basis, the model updating parameterisation and objective function formulation is developed. The data-driven approach employs residuals from vibration estimations obtained using multiple-input finite impulse response filters. Both approaches are then verified using a simulated cantilever beam considering multiple damage scenarios. Finally, experimentally obtained data from an outdoor girder mast structure is used to validate the approaches. In summary, this thesis provides an assessment of model updating and residual-based damage localisation by means of verification and validation cases. It is found that the residual-based method exhibits numerical performance sufficient for real-time applications while providing a high sensitivity towards damage. However, the localisation accuracy is found to be superior using the model updating method

Runtime Hardware Reconfiguration in Wireless Sensor Networks for Condition Monitoring

The integration of miniaturized heterogeneous electronic components has enabled the deployment of tiny sensing platforms empowered by wireless connectivity known as wireless sensor networks. Thanks to an optimized duty-cycled activity, the energy consumption of these battery-powered devices can be reduced to a level where several years of operation is possible. However, the processing capability of currently available wireless sensor nodes does not scale well with the observation of phenomena requiring a high sampling resolution. The large amount of data generated by the sensors cannot be handled efficiently by low-power wireless communication protocols without a preliminary filtering of the information relevant for the application. For this purpose, energy-efficient, flexible, fast and accurate processing units are required to extract important features from the sensor data and relieve the operating system from computationally demanding tasks. Reconfigurable hardware is identified as a suitable technology to fulfill these requirements, balancing implementation flexibility with performance and energy-efficiency. While both static and dynamic power consumption of field programmable gate arrays has often been pointed out as prohibitive for very-low-power applications, recent programmable logic chips based on non-volatile memory appear as a potential solution overcoming this constraint. This thesis first verifies this assumption with the help of a modular sensor node built around a field programmable gate array based on Flash technology. Short and autonomous duty-cycled operation combined with hardware acceleration efficiently drop the energy consumption of the device in the considered context. However, Flash-based devices suffer from restrictions such as long configuration times and limited resources, which reduce their suitability for complex processing tasks. A template of a dynamically reconfigurable architecture built around coarse-grained reconfigurable function units is proposed in a second part of this work to overcome these issues. The module is conceived as an overlay of the sensor node FPGA increasing the implementation flexibility and introducing a standardized programming model. Mechanisms for virtual reconfiguration tailored for resource-constrained systems are introduced to minimize the overhead induced by this genericity. The definition of this template architecture leaves room for design space exploration and application- specific customization. Nevertheless, this aspect must be supported by appropriate design tools which facilitate and automate the generation of low-level design files. For this purpose, a software tool is introduced to graphically configure the architecture and operation of the hardware accelerator. A middleware service is further integrated into the wireless sensor network operating system to bridge the gap between the hardware and the design tools, enabling remote reprogramming and scheduling of the hardware functionality at runtime. At last, this hardware and software toolchain is applied to real-world wireless sensor network deployments in the domain of condition monitoring. This category of applications often require the complex analysis of signals in the considered range of sampling frequencies such as vibrations or electrical currents, making the proposed system ideally suited for the implementation. The flexibility of the approach is demonstrated by taking examples with heterogeneous algorithmic specifications. Different data processing tasks executed by the sensor node hardware accelerator are modified at runtime according to application requests