Search

Acoustic emission (AE) signals are useful for the condition monitoring of mechanical seals as tribological regimes affect the AE signatures. In this paper the investigation develops a mathematical model that can predict the energy of an AE signal under different tribological regimes. The developed model has been validated with experimental studies and satisfactory results have been perceived. Therefore, the model has strong potential to be used to obtain tribological behaviour of mechanical seals and hence develop a reliable and accurate condition monitoring system under varying operating conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In order to discriminate small changes for early fault diagnosis of rotating machines, condition monitoring demands that the measurement of instantaneous angular speed (IAS) of the machines be as accurate as possible. This paper develops the theoretical basis and practical implementation of IAS data acquisition and IAS estimation when noise influence is included. IAS data is modelled as a frequency modulated signal of which the signal-to-noise ratio can be improved by using a high-resolution encoder. From this signal model and analysis, optimal configurations for IAS data collection are addressed for high accuracy IAS measurement. Simultaneously, a method based on analytic signal concept and fast Fourier transform is also developed for efficient and accurate estimation of IAS. Finally, a fault diagnosis is carried out on an electric induction motor driving system using IAS measurement. The diagnosis results show that using a high-resolution encoder and a long data stream can achieve noise reduction by more than 10dB in the frequency range of interest, validating the model and algorithm developed. Moreover, the results demonstrate that IAS measurement outperforms conventional vibration in diagnosis of incipient faults of motor rotor bar defects and shaft misalignment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper presents a method based on the extraction of the largest amplitude impact transients (ELAIT) for diagnosing the rolling element defect in bearings. As a defected rolling element causes two largest amplitude impact transients (LAITs) during a spin period when the element passes the load zone centre, LAITs are separated for each rolling element according to the kinematics of the bearing operation. By applying band-pass filtering, demodulation, low-pass filtering, and ensemble averaging to these LAITs, an enhanced signature named envelope ensemble average (EEA) is obtained for each rolling element, which allows a reliable indication of the defected elements. The robustness of the method is evaluated by investigating the localised fault model of rolling bearings with the inclusion of phase errors caused by rotational speed oscillation and rolling element slippage along with additive white noises. Evaluation results show that EEA signatures are very sensitive to element defects and give an accurate indication of the most probably defected element, and the ELAIT method is robust to rotational speed oscillation and slippage. The same performance is also achieved when the method was validated with experimental signals from a test rig of machinery fault simulation, showing effectiveness and robustness in detecting rolling element defects in an operated bearing. Besides, the proposed method can be easily implemented online as it does not need a tachometer and is implemented at low computation cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gear tooth surface wear is a common failure mode. It occurs over relatively long periods of service nonetheless, it degrades operating efficiency and leads to other major failures such as excessive tooth removal and catastrophic breakage. To develop accurate wear detection and diagnosis approaches at the early phase of the wear, this paper examines the gear dynamic responses from both experimental and numerical studies with increasing extents of wear on tooth contact surfaces. An experimental test facility comprising of a back-to-back two-stage helical gearbox arrangement was used in a run-to-failure test, in which variable sinusoidal and step increment loads along with variable speeds were applied and gear wear was allowed to progress naturally. A comprehensive dynamic model was also developed to study the influence of surface wear on gear dynamic response, with the inclusion of time-varying stiffness and tooth friction based on elasto-hydrodynamic lubrication (EHL) principles. The model consists of an 18 degree of freedom (DOF) vibration system, which includes the effects of the supporting bearings, driving motor and loading system. It also couples the transverse and torsional motions resulting from time-varying friction forces, time varying mesh stiffness and the excitation of different wear severities. Vibration signatures due to tooth wear severity and frictional excitations were acquired for the parameter determination and the validation of the model with the experimental results. The experimental test and numerical model results show clearly correlated behaviour, over different gear sizes and geometries. The spectral peaks at the meshing frequency components along with their sidebands were used to examine the response patterns due to wear. The paper concludes that the mesh vibration amplitudes of the second and third harmonics as well as the sideband components increase considerably with the extent of wear and hence these can be used as effective features for fault detection and diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A full generalization of Gini index is proposed for sparse quantification. • Fully generalized Gini indices are theoretically proven to be sparsity measures. • Two key performances of fully generalized Gini indices are investigated. • Fully generalized Gini indices exhibit excellent performance in characterizing repetitive transients. • Fully generalized Gini indices can effectively achieve bearing condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. The classic Gini index (GI) is generalized recently by using nonlinear weight sequences as sparsity measures for sparse quantification and machine condition monitoring. The generalized GIs with different weight parameters are more robust to random transients. However, they show insufficient performance in discriminating repetitive transients under noise contamination. To overcome this shortage, this paper proposes a two-parameter generalization method to tune not only the weight parameter but also the norm order, allowing for a full generalization of the classic GI to quantify transient features and leading to new statistical indicators which are named fully generalized GIs (FGGIs). Mathematical derivations show that FGGIs satisfy at least four of the six typical attributes of sparsity measures and that those with weight parameter equal to one satisfy at least five sparse attributes, proving that they are a new family of sparsity measures. Numerical simulations demonstrate that FGGIs can monotonically evaluate the sparseness of the signals and that the FGGIs with appropriate parameters exhibit improved performance in resisting random transient interferences and discriminating noise-contaminated repetitive transients compared to traditional sparsity measures. The performance of FGGIs in the condition monitoring of rolling element bearings is validated using two different run-to-failure experiment datasets, including a gradual failure and a sudden failure. The results show that increasing the norm order can improve the capability of FGGIs to characterize transient fault features, allowing more accurate trending of bearing health conditions, and therefore achieving better condition monitoring performance than the traditional sparsity measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bearing waviness is a kind of geometric unevenness on the surface of bearing components, which has vital influence on lifetime, vibration and noise. In order to accurately evaluate the impact of waviness on bearing operating performance and diagnostic features, it is necessary to reveal the mapping relationship between waviness excitation and vibration characteristics. However, current simulated waviness when modeling bearing vibrations is usually simplified by a uniform or non-uniform sinusoidal function, which cannot characterize the real topography of bearing waviness and lead to inaccuracy of diagnostics and prognostics. To address this issue, a novel waviness characterizing method based on Gaussian filter is developed in this study. Based on the proposed waviness characterizing method, a bearing waviness dynamic model is developed and vibration responses under various amplitude and order of waviness are investigated by simulation and experiment. Results show that the established waviness characterizing method can generate waviness curves closer to the actual shape. The bearing waviness dynamic model and the based vibration responses reveals unusual random phenomenon due to different waviness effects. These findings provide theoretical support for accurate identification of waviness on vibration characteristics, which has great significance on condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of bearing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Proposed a semantic construction method using adaptive resonance demodulation, which improves the interpretability of semantic features. • Proposed a semantic-induced zero-shot diagnosis framework to identify unknown compound faults using single fault samples of railway bearings. For the challenges of diverse compound faults and low identification accuracy of railway bearings, a new zero-shot diagnosis model based on adaptive resonance demodulation semantic is proposed for the compound fault diagnosis of railway bearings. The model adopts adaptive resonance demodulation to identify the optimal resonance frequency band rich in fault information in bearing signals, and constructs the single and compound fault semantics of samples without separating the compound fault signals, thus improving the interpretability of semantic features. Moreover, spatial Euclidean distance is used to measure the similarity of features and semantics in the mapping space, which enables the identification of unknown compound faults by single faults. Verification through railway bearing data shows that this model effectively improves the compound fault identification accuracy under zero samples and is better than the comparison models. The research results can provide theoretical reference for the research and application of railway bearing fault diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A metastructure-aided bearing fault signal enhancing diagnosis method is proposed. • Drum-shaped metastructure creates selective frequency band enhancement. • Artificially adjustable resonance for full band demodulation. • Cost-efficient rolling bearing fault diagnosis with low sampling rate. Rolling bearings, extensively utilized in rotating machinery, have critical significance for online fault diagnosis in the domains of industrial equipment maintenance and accident prevention. Presently, fault diagnosis methods heavily rely on identifying the optimal resonance band in the high-frequency range (several kHz) to achieve high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) fault information. However, these approaches, which necessitate high sampling rate sensing systems and complex algorithm deployments, contradict the practical requirements for cost-effective sensors and edge computing in online diagnosis. To address this contradiction, this paper introduces a novel Drum-shaped Metastructure (DMS) to enhance weak bearing fault signals, thus promoting the detection performance of conventional sensors. The DMS is constructed with a drumhead metastructure consisting of a central block mass attached with four spiral beams, of which its length can be adjusted by a tunable frequency mechanism (TFM) for different frequency responses of interest. The detail of its selective frequency enhancement characteristics is first studied through numerical simulations within a frequency range of 200 Hz to 1000 Hz. Subsequently, the effectiveness of the weak signal enhancement is verified on various bearing test systems, which utilize a prototype DMS fabricated by 3D printing. The results present a significant enhancement in the SNRs of the bearing fault signal, which is achieved by demodulating the full frequency band without the need for complex algorithms. Therefore, the proposed DMS provides a new cost-efficient approach to weak bearing fault diagnosis and online monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rolling bearings are important parts of mechanical equipment. However, the early failures of the bearing are usually masked by heavy noise. This brings about difficulties to the extraction of its fault features. Therefore, there is a need to develop a reliable method for early fault detection of the bearing. Considering this issue, a novel fault diagnosis method using the improved wavelet threshold denoising and fast spectral correlation (Fast-SC) is proposed. First, to solve the discontinuity of the hard threshold function and avoid the constant deviation triggered by the soft threshold function, a piecewise continuous threshold function is proposed by using a new threshold selection rule to denoise the original signal. In the new threshold function, the adjuster α is introduced to improve the traditional wavelet denoising algorithm, so as to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the original signal more effectively. Then, the denoised signal is analysed by Fast-SC to identify the rolling bearing fault features. Finally, simulation analysis and experimental data demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective for rolling bearing fault detection compared with Fast-SC and the combined method based on traditional wavelet threshold and Fast-SC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A multi-sensor information fusion covariance matrix scheme is presented for multi-sensor feature fusion. • A novel MCFD is proposed to demodulate fault modulation features from original vibration signals. • A MCFD-based framework is developed for multi-sensor driven gearbox intelligent fault diagnosis. • Experiment results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed MCFD-based framework. Accurate fault detection is extremely important to ensure stable gearbox operation. Data-driven schemes using cyclic spectral have received significant attention due to their robust demodulation performance. However, these schemes are mainly applied to process single sensor signals, and they are unable to accurately obtain precise fault features. This paper proposed a novel multiscale cyclic frequency demodulation (MCFD)-based feature fusion framework for multi-sensor driven gearbox intelligent fault diagnosis. Firstly, the MCFD is proposed to analyze the vibration signals from multi-sensor driven gearbox, which acquires the multi-sensor mode information without setting parameters in advance. Thereafter, the grey relational degree between the multi-sensor mode information and original signal is calculated, and its results are normalized to obtain the relationship coefficients. Finally, the acquired coefficients are performed for multi-sensor information fusion to form the covariance matrix for gearbox fault diagnosis. The effectiveness of the proposed feature fusion framework is validated using the gearbox case. The comparative experiments indicate that this framework outperforms comparative algorithms for multi-sensor driven gearbox fault diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• ORS is developed to be installed on the rotating shaft for vibration measurements. • The developed ORS largely improves the SNR of vibration collections than OHS. • The FFT-based fault diagnosis theory for the rolling bearing is presented. • ORS can achieve easier and more robust Hilbert envelope analysis for diagnosis. • Results validate the performance of ORS for early rolling bearing fault diagnosis. The traditional on-house sensing (OHS) accelerometer for vibration measurements causes poor signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and complicated fault modulations, which increases the difficulty and complexity for early bearing fault diagnosis. To overcome these challenges, this paper develops a wireless triaxial on-rotor sensing (ORS) system to largely improve the SNR and deduces fast Fourier transform (FFT) and Hilbert envelope analysis for accurate early rolling bearing fault diagnosis, which largely improves accuracy and efficiency for early fault diagnosis. First, the development of the ORS system for wireless vibration measurements is given. Second, the theoretical diagnostic relationships between dynamic ORS signals and rolling bearing faults are derived for FFT and Hilbert envelope analysis for the first time. Finally, the induction motor tests with outer and inner race faults successfully validate that both simple FFT and Hilbert envelope analysis can achieve more robust early rolling bearing fault diagnosis compared to OHS measurements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The proposed method extends the cyclic frequency range to Fs /2. • The designed scale factor in CWT can help locate important frequency bands. • TKEO is improved to process the single-carrier signal in the frequency domain. • The developed method can enhance the fault features effectively. • Induction motor tests validate the superiority of the method for early fault detection. The cyclostationary analysis techniques have been extensively explored for the purpose of fault detection in rotating machinery. However, there are still huge challenges because of both limited detection frequency range and low fault identification accuracy. This paper proposes an improved cyclostationary method to enhance incipient fault features. Firstly, the continuous wavelet transform is used to accurately locate important frequency bands, and the fault modulation mechanism or fast kurtogram can be adopted to design the optimal wavelet transform scale factor. Secondly, the Teager-Kaiser energy operator is improved to be used in the frequency domain for the weak fault feature enhancement. Finally, fault features are presented in the cyclic frequency domain through spectral coherence and enhanced envelope spectrum. The proposed method is verified through both numerical simulation and experiments, including incipient half-broken rotor bar, and rolling bearing outer race faults in induction motors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the motor current signal, the characteristic frequency of broken rotor bar (BRB) fault is modulated by the supply frequency and it decreases with the decrease of the load, resulting it to be easily buried under light load conditions. Teager–Kaiser energy operator (TKEO) has shown better performance to detect the BRB faults than classical methods, such as envelope analysis and spectral analysis. However, the original definition of TKEO leads to its result lack of physical meanings and the causal processing in TKEO can lead to phase distortion and nonideal filter characteristics. Therefore, this article proposes a normalized frequency-domain energy operator (FDEO) for the BRB fault diagnosis, which does not require causal processing and calculates multiple differentiations in the frequency domain with equal accuracy in one operation. Furthermore, the normalized FDEO removes the influence of the supply frequency followed by the spectral analysis to extract fault features. The mathematical model of induction motor (IM) under healthy and faulty condition is studied in this article. Then, the proposed approach is experimentally validated with seeded one and two BRB faults operating under various load conditions. To verify the effectiveness, the results are compared with the TKEO, envelope analysis, and spectral analysis. It was found that the proposed method provides slightly obvious fault features with respect to the TKEO, especially when the IMs run under light load conditions with two BRB faults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rolling element bearings are one of the critical elements in rotating machinery of energy engineering systems. A defective roller of bearing moves in and out of the load zone during each revolution of the cage. Larger amplitude impact transients (LAITs) are produced when the defective roller passes the load zone centre and the defective area strikes the inner or outer races. A series of LAIT segments with higher signal to noise ratio are separated from a continuous vibration signal according to the bearing geometry and kinematics. In order to eliminate the phase errors between different LAIT segments that can arise from rotational speed fluctuations and roller slippages, unbiased autocorrelation is introduced to align the phases of LAIT segments. The unbiased autocorrelation signals make the ensemble averaging more accurate, and hence, archive enhanced diagnostic signatures, which are denoted as LAIT-AEAs for brevity. The diagnostic method based on LAIT separation and autocorrelation ensemble average (AEA) is evaluated with the datasets captured from real bearings of two different experiment benches. The validation results of the LAIT-AEAs are compared with the squared envelope spectrums (SESs) yielded based on two state-of-the-art techniques of Fast Kurtogram and Autogram. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel model for fault detection of rolling bearing is proposed. It is based on a high-performance support vector machine (SVM) that is developed with a multifeature fusion and self-regulating particle swarm optimization (SRPSO). The fundamental of multikernel least square support vector machine (MK-LS-SVM) is overviewed to identify a classifier that allows multidimension features from empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to be fused with high generalization property. Then the multidimension parameters of the MK-LS-SVM are configured by the SRPSO for further performance improvement. Finally, the proposed model is evaluated through experiments and comparative studies. The results prove its effectiveness in detecting and classifying bearing faults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a novel model for fault detection of rolling bearing is proposed. It is based on a high-performance support vector machine (SVM) that is developed with a multifeature fusion and self-regulating particle swarm optimization (SRPSO). The fundamental of multikernel least square support vector machine (MK-LS-SVM) is overviewed to identify a classifier that allows multidimension features from empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to be fused with high generalization property. Then the multidimension parameters of the MK-LS-SVM are configured by the SRPSO for further performance improvement. Finally, the proposed model is evaluated through experiments and comparative studies. The results prove its effectiveness in detecting and classifying bearing faults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A multiscale denoising branch is developed to extract multi-level information and reduce noise interference. • An improved flow direction strategy-based adaptive resonance branch is introduced to learn fault-related periodic impulsive features. • Case studies are conducted to validate the efficacy of the developed IFD-MDCN. Rolling bearings are the core components of rotating machinery, and their normal operation is crucial to the entire industrial production. Most existing condition monitoring methods have been devoted to extracting discriminative features from vibration signals that reflect bearing health status information. However, the complex working conditions of rolling bearings often make the periodic impulsive characteristics related to fault information easily buried in noise interferences. Therefore, it is challenging for existing approaches to learning discriminative fault-related features in these scenarios. To address this issue, a novel multibranch CNN named IFD-MDCN is developed in this paper, which represents multibranch denoising convolutional networks (MDCN) with an improved flow direction (IFD) strategy. The main contributions of this work include: (1) designing a multiscale denoising branch to extract multi-level information and reduce noise impact. More specifically, the multiscale denoising branch adopts a Gaussian multi-level noise reduction procedure to represent vibration signals at multiple levels and filter out the noise components, and then it uses a multiscale convolutional module to extract abundant features from these denoised signal representations; (2) establishing an improved flow direction strategy-based adaptive resonance branch to learn periodic impulsive features associated with fault information from vibration signals. Extensive experimental results reveal that the IFD-MDCN outperforms five state-of-the-art approaches, especially in strong noise scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A new calculation model of the tooth torsional deformation caused by the NDL along TWD is presented. • A double-layer iterative model for TVMS and load distribution of gears is proposed considering the effects of NDL along TWD. • The proposed model can achieve the decoupling calculation of TVMS and the load along TWD caused by the early-stage crack. • FE method proves the accuracy and high efficiency of the proposed model. • The effects of crack parameters and torque on the tooth torsional deformation, TVMS and load distribution are revealed. To reveal the coupling relationship between the time-varying mesh stiffness (TVMS) and the load distribution along the tooth width direction (TWD) of gears with early-stage crack (ESC), a double-layer iterative analytical model for the TVMS and load distributions of gears is proposed considering the effects of the non-uniformly distributed load (NDL) along TWD caused by the ESC. In the proposed model, an analytical model of tooth torsional deformation and a parallel slice stiffness model of the tooth pair with ESC are separately developed based on the slicing method. On this basis, a double-layer iterative calculation method for the TVMS and load distributions is proposed, in which the coupling relationships between the slice stiffness and load distribution along TWD as well as the TVMS and load distribution between the meshing tooth pairs are respectively presented with the inner- and outer- layer iterations. Finite element (FE) models are established to verify the proposed double-layer iterative model. The effects of crack parameters and applied torque on the tooth torsional deformation, TVMS, and load distributions of the gear with ESC are finally investigated based on the proposed model. The results show that the proposed model can realize the accurate and fast decoupling calculation of the TVMS and load distributions of gears with ESC. This study can provide a basis for the establishment of the refined ESC fault diagnosis method and the rapid evaluation of the load distributions of gears with asymmetric errors or faults along TWD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • A novel multi-stage noise reduction approach is developed. • EEMD and WT based denoising method is applied. • All IMFs are investigated and utilized for fault feature extraction. • MSB is used to extract fault feature for bearing fault diagnosis accurately. Abstract To extract impulsive feature from vibration signals with strong background noise and interference components for accurate bearing diagnostics. A multi-stage noise reduction method is proposed based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD), wavelet thresholding (WT) and modulation signal bispectrum (MSB). Firstly, noisy vibration signals are applied with EEMD to obtain a list of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) that leverage the desired modulation components to different degrees. Then, a number of initial IMFs in the high frequency range, which are separated by using the mean of the standardized accumulated modes (MSAM) to have more modulation contents, are further denoised by a wavelet thresholding approach. These cleaned IMFs in the high frequency are combined with the low frequency IMFs to construct a pre-denoised signal that maintains the modulation properties of the raw signal. Finally, modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) is used to extract the modulation signature by suppressing further the residual random noise and deterministic interference components. This multi-stage noise reduction method was validated through a simulation study and two experimental fault cases studies of rolling element bearing. The results were more accurate and reliable in diagnosing the bearing inner and outer race defects in comparison with the individual use of the state-of-the-art EEMD and MSB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A method to accurately calculate the blade characteristic frequency is proposed. • It relies on the physical relationship between the BPF and fundamental frequency. • Blade vibrations are separated using VKF with parameters optimization. • A framework for blade early diagnosis based on unsupervised learning is verified. Blade fault is a catastrophic failure of gas turbines. In order to improve the reliability of blade during operation, condition monitoring is one of the effective methods. However, there always exist two problems with blade monitoring: 1) challenges in warning of the occurrence of blade failure in advance and 2) difficulties finding the location after blade failure. In this article, we solve these problems by excavating the characteristics of blade-related signals in broadband casing vibration with advanced signal processing methods and machine learning technology. First, a novel method--Sparse Harmonic Product Spectrum (SHPS)--is proposed to accurately calculate blade passing frequency from gas turbine broadband casing vibration. The SPHS relies on Fourier transform, and its calculation utilizes the physical relationship between fundamental frequency and blade passing frequencies. Combining Vold-Kalman filter with adaptive parameter optimization process (AVKF), the blade-related vibration can be separated from casing vibration even in strong noise. Analysis of simulated casing vibration signal is used to verify the effectiveness and superiority of proposed method. Based on blade-related vibration, we build a gas turbine blade condition model in an unsupervised learning manner. The model can excavate potential blade failures earlier and more accurately than conventional threshold methods. Then, three coefficients are constructed according to the blade-related vibration characteristics to identify the blade fault location in multi-stage system. Moreover, the effectiveness of the proposed blade diagnosis framework is verified using actual industrial gas turbine blade fracturing failure data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Generalized envelopes and generalized envelope spectra are proposed for signal demodulation. • The performance of generalized envelope spectra in rolling bearing fault diagnosis is revealed using simulations and experiments. • The product envelope spectrum is proposed as an enhanced spectral analysis tool. • Product Envelope Spectrum Optimization-gram (PESOgram) is developed for rolling bearing fault diagnosis. • PESOgram shows excellent capability in identifying bearing fault characteristic frequencies. The vibration signal of a faulty rolling bearing exhibits typical non-stationarity – often in the form of cyclostationarity. The spectrum tools often used to characterize cyclostationarity mainly include envelope spectrum, squared envelope spectrum and log-envelope spectrum. In this paper, new detection methods of cyclostationarity are developed for obtaining a larger family of envelope analysis and their effectiveness in rolling bearing fault diagnosis is evaluated rigorously. Firstly, based on the simplified Box-Cox transformation, the generalized envelope signals are constructed from the analytic signal for demodulation purposes, and then a spectrum family named generalized envelope spectra (GESs) is proposed to reveal cyclostationarity. Especially, GESs with different transformation parameters exhibit different performance advantages against the random impulse noise and Gaussian background noise which are commonly present in rolling bearing vibration signals. Subsequently, a novel spectrum tool that combines the performance advantages of different GESs, called product envelope spectrum (PES), is developed to strengthen the capability to detect cyclostationarity. Finally, an enhanced envelope analysis named Product Envelope Spectral Optimization-gram (PESOgram) is proposed to improve the accuracy and robustness of PES for rolling bearing fault diagnosis in the presence of different fault-unrelated interference noises. The performance of the PESOgram method is validated on numerically generated signal and experimental signals collected from two railway axle bearing test rigs and compared with several state-of-the-art envelope analysis methods. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for fault diagnosis of rolling bearings and its advantages over other state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings has attracted extensive attention in industrial fields, which plays a vital role in guaranteeing the reliability, safety, and economical efficiency of mechanical systems. Traditional data-driven fault diagnosis methods require obtaining a dataset of full failure modes in advance as the training data. However, this kind of dataset is not always available in some critical industrial scenarios, which impairs the practicability of the data-driven fault diagnosis methods for various applications. A digital twin, which establishes a virtual representation of a physical entity to mirror its operating conditions, would make fault diagnosis of rolling bearings feasible when the fault data are insufficient. In this paper, we propose a novel digital twin-driven approach for implementing fault diagnosis of rolling bearings with insufficient training data. First, a dynamics-based virtual representation of rolling bearings is built to generate simulated data. Then, a Transformer-based network is developed to learn the knowledge of the simulated data for diagnostics. Meanwhile, a selective adversarial strategy is introduced to achieve cross-domain feature alignments in scenarios where the health conditions of the measured data are unknown. To this end, this study proposes a digital twin-driven fault diagnosis framework by using labeled simulated data and unlabeled measured data. The experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain high diagnostic performance when the real-world data is unlabeled and has unknown health conditions, proving that the proposed method has significant benefits for the health management of critical rolling bearings. • A digital twin-driven intelligent diagnosis method is developed. • A high-fidelity digital twin model is built for the rolling bearing. • A partial domain adaptation algorithm is introduced for bearing condition assessment. • One test is conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deep learning-based fault diagnosis methods have made tremendous progress in recent years; however, most of these methods are coarse grained and data demanding that cannot find the root causes of mechanical system failures at a finer granularity with limited fault data. Therefore, in this study, we first investigate the few-shot fine-grained fault diagnosis (FSFGFD) problem, with the aim of identifying novel fine-grained faults under different working conditions using only few samples from each class. To address the difficulties of fine-grained fault feature extraction and poor model generalization to unseen few-shot faults in FSFGFD tasks, a novel attention-based deep meta-transfer learning (ADMTL) method is proposed. First, the failure modes under different working conditions are considered as fine-grained faults, and their raw signals are transformed into time–frequency images. Based on this, an attention mechanism is introduced to guide the feature extractor of the ADMTL on what information to learn. The ADMTL then follows a three-stage learning process of pre-training, meta-transfer, and meta-adaptation to achieve fast adaptation to new fine-grained faults using a priori knowledge gained from known faults. Furthermore, a parameter modulation strategy is employed to adaptively update the pre-trained network during the meta-transfer process. The comprehensive experimental results of three case studies demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art methods. The proposed method achieves excellent performance with an average accuracy of 99.08%, 95.86%, and 77.74% for FSFGFD tasks when performing meta-transfer within the same machine and between different machines, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An improved form of SWNSE is developed by generalizing the order of the norm. • A design framework for improved Gini indices is established and four specific forms of improved Gini index are proposed. • Improved Gini indices are proven to be sparsity measures. • A series of improved Gini indices are proposed for characterizing repetitive transients. • The improved Gini indices with norm order 3 exhibit better comprehensive performance. Sparsity measures are important and effective tools for accurately characterizing fault features and degradation trends of rotating machinery. In the past few decades, numerous sparsity measures, such as kurtosis, negentropy, Lp/Lq norm, pq-mean, smoothness index and Gini index, have been proposed and introduced for condition monitoring, fault diagnosis and remaining life prediction of rotating machinery. However, it is difficult for traditional sparsity measures to possess strong random impulse resistance and fault impulse discernibility simultaneously. To design robust sparsity measures for repetitive transient characterization and machine condition monitoring, an improved form of the sum of weighted normalized square envelope (SWNSE) is firstly developed by generalizing the order of the norm as a framework for adaptively quantifying the repetitive transients. Under this framework, a rank-dependent generalized Gini index (RDGGI) is proposed, allowing four specific forms of RDGGI to be reasonably constructed by introducing four weight sequence design methods. Theoretical derivation shows that the quantitative indices produced by the four specific forms of RDGGI satisfy at least five of the six attributes of sparsity measures, proving that the newly designed quantitative indices are sparsity measures, and are also scale-invariant and have a limited magnitude range between 0 and 1. Furthermore, a series of improved Gini indices are derived by setting typical norm orders and designing appropriate monotonically decreasing weight sequences, and simulation analysis is conducted to verify their three key properties in characterizing transient features. Finally, the performance of the improved Gini indices in characterizing bearing fault features for condition monitoring is verified using vibration datasets from two bearing run-to-failure experiments. Simulation and experimental results show that the improved Gini indices with norm order 3 can simultaneously possess strong resistance to random impulses and discernibility of fault impulses, demonstrating the superior performance of improved Gini indices in bearing condition monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A NFE is proposed to quantify the fault information distribution in the SCoh. • A WCES from the SCoh with normalized weight is proposed as fault detector. • WCES can effectively extract fault information distributed in multiple bands. • WCES delivers superior bearing diagnostic performance than SES, EES and IES. Enhanced envelope spectrum (EES) and improved envelope spectrum (IES) generated from spectral coherence (SCoh) are proven to be more robust fault detection tools than squared envelope spectrum (SES). However, EES cannot effectively detect the fault-induced components under strong interference noise and IES can only capture the information of a fault-sensitive resonance spectral frequency band. To overcome these problems, weighted combined envelope spectrum (WCES) from SCoh is proposed as a novel fault detector. WCES integrates the fault components distributed in multiple resonance frequency bands using normalized feature energy and removes the envelope spectrum slices with less fault information to exclude disturbance noises. The performance of WCES is validated using simulations and experiments and compared with the advanced envelope spectra. The results demonstrate that WCES can effectively detect bearing faults under strong interference noise and multiple resonances compared with the SES, EES and IES, and has potential application value in bearing diagnostics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A gear-shaft-bearing-housing dynamic model is proposed to reveal the modulation between bearing and gear. • Vibration Characteristics of bearing clearances under the effect of gear meshing is investigated. • An indicator is proposed based on MSB-SE for bearing clearances monitoring. • A run-to-failure gearbox test rig is designed to verify the effectiveness of the proposed indicator. Internal radial clearance is a key factor influencing bearing fatigue life. Moreover, bearings inevitably suffer from various wears and tears, which result in gradual increase of clearance and shorten bearing life. Monitoring bearing clearance changes using vibration can effectively indicate the bearing wear and provide good leading time to perform maintenances. Previous studies show that vibration at ball pass frequency on outer race (BPFO) can be based for clearance monitoring. However, such clearance induced vibration has not been well understood, especially under complicated dynamic interactions such as in a gearbox system. To fill this gap, this paper presents a nonlinear gear-shaft-bearing-housing vibration model with fourteen degree of freedom (DOF) to investigate the vibration responses under the dynamic gear meshing force and progressively changed radial clearances at first. Then, the model was verified through a two-stage spur gearbox. Furthermore, bearing characteristics with different radial clearances under the influence of gear are revealed and indicator based on modulation signal bispectrum-sideband estimator (MSB-SE) was proposed. Finally, vibration data from a run-to-failure gearbox test rig was utilized to verify the effectiveness of the MSB-SE indicator for bearing clearances monitoring. Simulation results show that BPFO is modulated on gear meshing frequency (GMF) and BPFO amplitude from envelope spectrum increases with bearing clearances under the influence of gear meshing. Indicator based on MSB-SE, possessing the capability of purifying the interferences of gear meshing and strong noises, is effective to capture the variance of bearing clearances. The experiment based on a run-to-failure gearbox test rig provided evidence for the effectiveness of the proposed indicator, which is more accurate than BPFO amplitude from conventional envelope analysis and time-domain indicators, such as RMS and kurtosis. These findings are of significance for bearing fault diagnosis and maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weak fault signals, high coupling data, and unknown faults commonly exist in fault diagnosis systems, causing low detection and identification performance of fault diagnosis methods based on T 2 statistics or cross entropy. This paper proposes a new fault diagnosis method based on optimal bandwidth kernel density estimation (KDE) and Jensen–Shannon (JS) divergence distribution for improved fault detection performance. KDE addresses weak signal and coupling fault detection, and JS divergence addresses unknown fault detection. Firstly, the formula and algorithm of the optimal bandwidth of multidimensional KDE are presented, and the convergence of the algorithm is proved. Secondly, the difference in JS divergence between the data is obtained based on the optimal KDE and used for fault detection. Finally, the fault diagnosis experiment based on the bearing data from Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center is conducted. The results show that for known faults, the proposed method has 10 % and 2 % higher detection rate than T 2 statistics and the cross entropy method, respectively. For unknown faults, T 2 statistics cannot effectively detect faults, and the proposed method has approximately 15 % higher detection rate than the cross entropy method. Thus, the proposed method can effectively improve the fault detection rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most conventional wind turbine fault diagnosis techniques only use a single type of signal as fault feature and their performance could be limited to such signal characteristics. In this paper, multiple types of signals including vibration, temperature, and stator current are used simultaneously for wind turbine misalignment diagnosis. The model is constructed by integrated methods based on Dempster–Shafer (D–S) evidence theory. First, the time domain, frequency domain, and time–frequency domain features of the collected vibration, temperature, and stator current signal are respectively taken as the inputs of the least square support vector machine (LSSVM). Then, the LSSVM outputs the posterior probabilities of the normal, parallel misalignment, angular misalignment, and integrated misalignment of the transmission systems. The posterior probabilities are used as the basic probabilities of the evidence fusion, and the fault diagnosis is completed according to the D–S synthesis and decision rules. Considering the correlation between the inputs, the vibration and current feature vectors' dimensionalities are reduced by t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), and the improved artificial bee colony algorithm is used to optimize the parameters of the LSSVM. The results of the simulation and experimental platform demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed model and its superiority compared with other models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an essential mechanical device in many industrial applications, reciprocating compressors have a high demand for operating efficiency and availability. Because the temperature of each part of a reciprocating compressor depends considerably on operating conditions, faults in any parts will cause the variation of the temperature distribution, which provides the possibility to distinguish the fault type of reciprocating compressors by differentiating the distribution using infrared thermal imaging. In this paper, three types of common fault are laboratory experimented in an uncontrolled temperature environment. The temperature distribution signals of a reciprocating compressor are captured by a non-contact infrared camera remotely in the form of heat maps during the experimental process. Based on the temperature distribution under baseline condition, temperature fields of six main components were selected via Hue-Saturation-Value (HSV) image as diagnostic features. During the experiment, the average grayscale values of each component were calculated to form 6-dimension vectors to represent the variation of the temperature distribution. A computational efficient multiclass support vector machine (SVM) model is then used for classifying the differences of the distributions, and the classification results demonstrate that the average temperatures of six main components aided by SVM is a promising technique to diagnose the faults of reciprocating compressors under various operating conditions with a classification accuracy of more than 99%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The vibration of a planetary gearbox (PG) is complex and mutually modulated, which makes the weak features of incipient fault difficult to detect. To target this problem, a novel method, based on an adaptive order bispectrum slice (AOBS) and the fault characteristics energy ratio (FCER), is proposed. The order bispectrum (OB) method has shown its effectiveness in the feature extraction of bearings and fixed-shaft gearboxes. However, the effectiveness of the PG still needs to be explored. The FCER is developed to sum up the fault information, which is scattered by mutual modulation. In this method, the raw vibration signal is firstly converted to that in the angle domain. Secondly, the characteristic slice of AOBS is extracted. Different from the conventional OB method, the AOBS is extracted by searching for a characteristic carrier frequency adaptively in the sensitive range of signal coupling. Finally, the FCER is summed up and calculated from the fault features that were dispersed in the characteristic slice. Experimental data was processed, using both the AOBS-FCER method, and the method that combines order spectrum analysis with sideband energy ratio (OSA-SER), respectively. Results indicated that the new method is effective in incipient fault feature extraction, compared with the methods of OB and OSA-SER. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• An enhanced MSB based non-Gaussian noise reduction method is proposed. • An AR model is developed as a pre-filter process unit to reduce the non-Gaussian noise. • The performance of fault feature extraction of the proposed AR-MSB is tested with various data types and bearing fault cases. • AR-MSB has high accuracy in fault feature extraction compared with the conventional MSB and FK. Many methods have been developed for machinery fault diagnosis addressing only Gaussian noise reduction, the major weaknesses of these methods are their performance for non-Gaussian noise suppression. Modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) is a useful signal processing method with significant advantages over traditional spectral analysis as it has the unique properties of Gaussian noise elimination and demodulation. However, it is susceptible to non-Gaussian noise that normally occurs in the practical applications. In view of the deficiency of MSB, in this paper, an autoregressive (AR) modeling filter was developed based on non-Gaussian noise suppression to improve the performance of MSB for machinery fault detection. The AR model was considered as a pre-filter process unit to reduce the non-Gaussian noise. And the order of the AR model, which can affect the performance of the AR filter, was determined adaptively using a kurtosis-based indicator. However, the existing nonlinear modulation components remain in the AR filtered signal. The MSB was then applied to decompose the modulated components and eliminate the Gaussian noise from the filtered signal using AR model for the fault feature extraction accurately. The advantage of the AR model can effectively manage non-Gaussian noise, whereas the MSB can suppress Gaussian noise and is illustrated in the simulation signal. Furthermore, the proposed AR-MSB method was applied to analyze the vibration signals of defective bearings with outer race and inner race faults. By comparison, the proposed approach had a superior performance over conventional MSB and fast kurtogram in extracting fault features and was precise and effective for rolling element bearing fault diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internal combustion (IC) engine based powertrains are one of the most commonly used transmission systems in various industries such as train, ship and power generation industries. The powertrains, acting as the cores of machinery, dominate the performance of the systems; however, the powertrain systems are inevitably degraded in service. Consequently, it is essential to monitor the health of the powertrains, which can secure the high efficiency and pronounced reliability of the machines. Conventional vibration based monitoring approaches often require a considerable number of transducers due to large layout of the systems, which results in a cost-intensive, difficultly-deployed and not-robust monitoring scheme. This study aims to develop an efficient and cost-effective approach for monitoring large engine powertrains. Our model based investigation showed that a single measurement at the position of coupling is optimal for monitoring deployment. By using the instantaneous angular speed (IAS) obtained at the coupling, a novel fault indicator and polar representation showed the effective and efficient fault diagnosis for the misfire faults in different cylinders under wide working conditions of engines; we also verified that by experimental studies. Based on the simulation and experimental investigation, it can be seen that single IAS channel is effective and efficient at monitoring the misfire faults in large powertrain systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accurate diagnosis of incipient faults in wind turbine (WT) assets will provide sufficient lead time to apply an optimal maintenance for the expensive WT assets which often are located in a remote and harsh environment and their maintenance usually needs heavy equipment and highly skilled engineers. This paper presents an online bearing clearance monitoring approach to diagnose the change of bearing clearance, providing an early and interpretable indication of bearing health conditions. A novel dynamic load distribution method is developed to efficiently gain the general characteristics of vibration response of bearings without local defects but with small geometric errors. It shows that the ball pass frequency of outer race (BPFO) is the primary exciting source due to biased load distribution relating to bearing clearance. The geometric errors, including various orders of runouts on different bearing parts, can be the secondary excitation source. Both sources lead to compound modulation responses with very low amplitudes, being more than 20 dB lower than that of a small local defect on raceways and often buried by background noise. Then, Modulation Signal Bispectrum (MSB) is identified to purify the noisy signal and Gini index is introduced to represent the peakness of MSB results, thereby an interpretable indicator bounded between 0 and 1 is established to show bearing clearance status. Datasets from both a dedicated bearing test and a run-to-failure gearbox test are employed to verify the performance and reliability of the proposed approach. Results show that the proposed method is capable to indicate a change of about 20 µm in bearing clearance online, which provides a significantly long lead time compared to the diagnosis method that focuses only on local defects. Therefore, this method provides a big opportunity to implement more cost-effective maintenance works or carry out timely remedial actions to prolong the lifespan of bearings. Obviously, it is applicable to not only WT assets, but also most rotating machines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broken rotor bar (BRB) faults are one of the most common faults in induction motors (IM). One or more broken bars can reduce the performance and efficiency of the IM and hence waste the electrical power and decrease the reliability of the whole mechanical system. This paper proposes an effective fault diagnosis method using the Teager–Kaiser energy operator (TKEO) for BRB faults detection based on the motor current signal analysis (MCSA). The TKEO is investigated and applied to remove the main supply component of the motor current for accurate fault feature extraction, especially for an IM operating at low load with low slip. Through sensing the estimation of the instantaneous amplitude (IA) and instantaneous frequency (IF) of the motor current signal using TKEO, the fault characteristic frequencies can be enhanced and extracted for the accurate detection of BRB fault severities under different operating conditions. The proposed method has been validated by simulation and experimental studies that tested the IMs with different BRB fault severities to consider the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained results are compared with those obtained using the conventional envelope analysis methods and showed that the proposed method provides more accurate fault diagnosis results and can distinguish the BRB fault types and severities effectively, especially for operating conditions with low loads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To realize the accurate fault detection of rolling element bearings, a novel fault detection method based on non-stationary vibration signal analysis using weighted average ensemble empirical mode decomposition (WAEEMD) and modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) is proposed in this paper. Bispectrum is a third-order statistic, which can not only effectively suppress Gaussian noise, but also help identify phase coupling. However, it cannot effectively decompose the modulation components which are inherent in vibration signals. To alleviate this issue, MSB based on the modulation characteristics of the signals is developed for demodulation and noise reduction. Still, the direct application of MSB has some interfering frequency components when extracting fault features from non-stationary signals. Ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) is an advanced nonlinear and non-stationary signal processing approach that can decompose the signal into a list of stationary intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). The proposed method takes advantage of WAEEMD and MSB for bearing fault diagnosis based on vibration signature analysis. Firstly, the vibration signal is decomposed into IMFs with a different frequency band using EEMD. Then, the IMFs are reconstructed into a new signal by the weighted average method, called WAEEMD, based on Teager energy kurtosis (TEK). Finally, MSB is applied to decompose the modulated components in the reconstructed signal and extract the fault characteristic frequencies for fault detection. Furthermore, the efficiency and performance of the proposed WAEEMD-MSB approach is demonstrated on the fault diagnosis for a motor bearing outer race fault and a gearbox bearing inner race fault. The experimental results verify that the WAEEMD-MSB has superior performance over conventional MSB and EEMD-MSB in extracting fault features and has precise and effective advantages for rolling element bearing fault detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fault identification for closed-loop control systems is a future trend in the field of fault diagnosis. Due to the inherent feedback adjustment mechanism, a closed-loop control system is generally very robust to external disturbances and internal noises. Closed-loop control systems often encourage faults to propagate inside the systems, which may lead to the consequence that faults amplitude becomes smaller and fault characteristics difference becomes more inapparent. Hence, it has been challenging to achieve fault identification for such systems. Traditional fault identification methods are not particularly designed for closed-loop control systems and thus cannot be applied directly. In this work, a new fault identification method is proposed, which is based on the deep neural network for closed-loop control systems. Firstly, the fault propagation mechanism in closed-loop control systems is theoretically derived, and the influence of fault propagation on system variables is analyzed. Then deep neural network is applied to find fault characteristics difference between different data modes, and a sliding window is used to amplify the fault-to-noise ratio and characteristics difference, with an aim to increase the identification performance. To verify this method, the simulations that are based on a numerical simulation model, the Tennessee industrial system and the satellite attitude control system are conducted. The results show that the proposed method is more feasible and more effective in fault identification for closed-loop control systems compared with traditional data-driven identification methods, including distance-based and angle-based identification methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the performance of the conventional bispectrum (CB) method and its new variant, the modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) method, in analysing the electrical current signals of induction machines for the condition monitoring of rotor systems driven by electrical motors. Current signal models which include the phases of the various electrical and magnetic quantities are explained first to show the theoretical relationships of spectral sidebands and their associated phases due to rotor faults. It then discusses the inefficiency of CB and the proficiency of MSB in characterising the sidebands based on simulated signals. Finally, these two methods are applied to analyse current signals measured from different rotor faults, including broken rotor bar (BRB), downstream gearbox wear progressions and various compressor faults, and the diagnostic results show that the MSB outperforms the CB method significantly in that it provides more accurate and sparse diagnostics, thanks to its unique capability of nonlinear modulation detection and random noise suppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]