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This paper presents the novel technique for fault diagnosis of bearing by fusion of two different sensors: Vibration based and acoustic emission-based sensor. The diagnosis process involves the following steps: Data Acquisition and signal processing, Feature extraction, Classification of features, High-level data fusion and Decision making. Experiments are carried out upon test bearings with a fusion of sensors to obtain signals in time domain. Then, signal indicators for each signal have been calculated. Classifier called K-nearest neighbor (KNN) has been used for classification of fault conditions. Then, high-level sensor fusion was carried out to gain useful data for fault classification. The decision-making step allows understanding that vibration-based sensors are helpful in detecting inner race and outer race defect whereas the acoustic-based sensor is more useful for ball defects detection. These studies based on fusion helps to detect all the faults of rolling bearing at an early stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of high-speed intelligent rail transit has increased the number of sensors applied on trains. These play an important role in train state control and monitoring. These sensors generally work in a severe environment, so the key problem for sensor data acquisition is to ensure data accuracy and reliability. In this paper, we follow the sequence of sensor signal flow, present sensor signal sensing technology, sensor data acquisition, and processing technology, as well as sensor fault diagnosis technology based on the voltage, current, speed, and temperature sensors which are commonly used in train traction systems. Finally, intelligent sensors and future research directions of rail transit train sensors are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the condition monitoring of roller bearings, the measured signals are often compounded due to the unknown multi-vibration sources and complex transfer paths. Moreover, the sensors are limited in particular locations and numbers. Thus, this is a problem of underdetermined blind source separation for the vibration sources estimation, which makes it difficult to extract fault features exactly by ordinary methods in running tests. To improve the effectiveness of compound fault diagnosis in roller bearings, the present paper proposes a new method to solve the underdetermined problem and to extract fault features based on variational mode decomposition. In order to surmount the shortcomings of inadequate signals collected through limited sensors, a vibration signal is firstly decomposed into a number of band-limited intrinsic mode functions by variational mode decomposition. Then, the demodulated signal with the Hilbert transform of these multi-channel functions is used as the input matrix for independent component analysis. Finally, the compound faults are separated effectively by carrying out independent component analysis, which enables the fault features to be extracted more easily and identified more clearly. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in compound fault separation, and a comparison experiment shows that the proposed method has higher adaptability and practicability in separating strong noise signals than the commonly-used ensemble empirical mode decomposition method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sensor data fusion plays an important role in fault diagnosis. Dempster-Shafer (D-R) evidence theory is widely used in fault diagnosis, since it is efficient to combine evidence from different sensors. However, under the situation where the evidence highly conflicts, it may obtain a counterintuitive result. To address the issue, a new method is proposed in this paper. Not only the statistic sensor reliability, but also the dynamic sensor reliability are taken into consideration. The evidence distance function and the belief entropy are combined to obtain the dynamic reliability of each sensor report. A weighted averaging method is adopted to modify the conflict evidence by assigning different weights to evidence according to sensor reliability. The proposed method has better performance in conflict management and fault diagnosis due to the fact that the information volume of each sensor report is taken into consideration. An application in fault diagnosis based on sensor fusion is illustrated to show the efficiency of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method improves the accuracy of fault diagnosis from 81.19% to 89.48% compared to the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Compound fault signal usually contains multiple characteristic signals and strong confusion noise, which makes it difficult to separate week fault signals from them through conventional ways, such as FFT-based envelope detection, wavelet transform or empirical mode decomposition individually. In order to improve the compound faults diagnose of rolling bearings via signals’ separation, the present paper proposes a new method to identify compound faults from measured mixed-signals, which is based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method and independent component analysis (ICA) technique. With the approach, a vibration signal is firstly decomposed into intrinsic mode functions (IMF) by EEMD method to obtain multichannel signals. Then, according to a cross correlation criterion, the corresponding IMF is selected as the input matrix of ICA. Finally, the compound faults can be separated effectively by executing ICA method, which makes the fault features more easily extracted and more clearly identified. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in compound fault separating, which works not only for the outer race defect, but also for the rollers defect and the unbalance fault of the experimental system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This correspondence is a companion paper to [J. Dong, M. Verhaegen, and F. Gustafsson, “Robust Fault Detection With Statistical Uncertainty in Identified Parameters,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 60, no. 10, Oct. 2012], extending it to fault isolation. Also, here, use is made of a linear in the parameters model representation of the input-output behavior of the nominal system (i.e. fault-free). The projection of the residual onto directions only sensitive to individual faults is robustified against the stochastic errors of the estimated model parameters. The correspondence considers additive error sequences to the input and output quantities that represent failures like drift, biased, stuck, or saturated sensors/actuators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Full ceramic bearings are considered the first step toward full ceramic, oil-free engines in the future. No research on full ceramic bearing fault diagnostics using acoustic emission (AE) sensors has been reported. Unlike their steel counterparts, signal processing methods to extract effective AE fault characteristic features and fault diagnostic systems for full ceramic bearings have not been developed. In this paper, a data mining based full ceramic bearing diagnostic system using AE based condition indicators (CIs) is presented. The system utilizes a new signal processing method based on Hilbert Huang transform to extract AE fault features for the computation of CIs. These CIs are used to build a data mining based fault classifier using a k-nearest neighbor algorithm. Seeded fault tests on full ceramic bearing outer race, inner race, balls, and cage are conducted on a bearing diagnostic test rig and AE burst data are collected. The effectiveness of the developed fault diagnostic system is validated using real full ceramic bearing seeded fault test data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a monitoring scheme to detect the state of the cooling capability for soft-starter-connected induction motors. Based on the estimated stator-winding temperature via dc-signal injection, the cooling capability of the motor can be monitored online using only voltage and current sensors. The thermal parameters of a simplified thermal model of the induction motor are identified using an extended Kalman filter approach, as an indication of the motor cooling capability. The proposed scheme can warn the users for proactive inspection and maintenance in the case of cooling-condition deterioration. The proposed method has been validated from experimental results under three different cooling conditions and variable-load conditions. The errors of thermal-parameter identification are within 3%. The proposed cooling-condition monitoring scheme, combined with the stator-winding-temperature monitoring scheme, can provide complete thermal protection for soft-starter-connected induction motors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate and timely bearing fault diagnosis is crucial to decrease the probability of unexpected failures of rotating machinery and improve the efficiency of its scheduled maintenance. Since convolutional neural networks (CNN) have poor feature extraction capability for sensor data with 1D format, CNN combined with signal processing algorithm is often adopted for fault diagnosis. This increases manual conversion work and expertise dependence while reducing the feasibility and robustness of the corresponding fault diagnosis method. In this paper, a novel sensor data-driven fault diagnosis method is proposed by fusing S-transform (ST) algorithm and CNN, namely ST-CNN. First of all, a ST layer is designed based on S-transform algorithm. In the ST layer, sensor data is automatically converted into 2D time-frequency matrix without manual conversion work. Then, a new ST-CNN model is constructed, and the time-frequency coefficient matrixes are inputted into the constructed ST-CNN model. After the training process of the ST-CNN model is completed, the classification layer such as softmax performs the fault diagnosis. Finally, the diagnosis performance of the proposed method is evaluated by using two public available datasets of bearings. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs the higher and more robust diagnosis performance than other existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]