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Maintaining exceptional product quality and boosting processing efficiency requires precise evaluation of various aspects of the turning process, including the cutting depth, feed rate, and size of the workpiece. This article presents a novel approach for observing the turning process state using modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) and motor current signals. A nonlinear model was established that clarifies the load torque oscillations during turning, which in turn affects the amplitude and phase modulation of the motor stator current. Random noise can be efficiently minimized using the MSB algorithm, allowing the extraction of the current-modulation characteristic sideband phase and amplitude from the collected current signal. This technique enables clear representation and enhanced monitoring of load torque changes throughout the turning process. The proposed method was validated via mathematical simulations and universal lathe tests, with the results indicating that the MSB phase and amplitude values effectively capture both dynamic and static torque alterations during the turning operation, making this approach a valuable tool for overseeing the turning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Helical gearboxes play a critical role in power transmission of industrial applications. They are vulnerable to various faults due to long-term and heavy-duty operating conditions. To improve the safety and reliability of helical gearboxes, it is necessary to monitor their health conditions and diagnose various types of faults. The conventional measurements for gearbox fault diagnosis mainly include lubricant analysis, vibration, airborne acoustics, thermal images, electrical signals, etc. However, a single domain measurement may lead to unreliable fault diagnosis and the contact installation of transducers is not always accessible, especially in harsh and dangerous environments. In this article, a Compressive Sensing (CS)-based Dual-Channel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) method was proposed to accurately and intelligently diagnose common gearbox faults based on two complementary non-contact measurements (thermal images and acoustic signals) from a mobile phone. The raw acoustic signals were analysed by the Modulation Signal Bispectrum (MSB) to highlight the coupled modulation components relating to gear faults and suppress the irrelevant components and random noise, which generates a series of two-dimensional matrices as sparse MSB magnitude images. Then, CS was used to reduce the image redundancy but retain key information owing to the high sparsity of thermal images and acoustic MSB images, which significantly accelerates the CNN training speed. The experimental results convincingly demonstrate that the proposed CS-based Dual-Channel CNN method significantly improves the diagnostic accuracy (99.39% on average) of industrial helical gearbox faults compared to the single-channel ones. • Using two complementary non-contact measurements to overcome the instability and inaccuracy of a single domain signal. • Reducing the image redundancy and capacity to significantly accelerate the training speed through Compressive Sensing. • The proposed Compressive Sensing-based Dual-Channel CNN method achieves accurate and efficient gearbox fault diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transient impulses caused by local faults are critical informative indicators for rolling element bearing fault diagnosis. The methods for accurately extracting transient impulses while suppressing strong background noise and interference components have received extensive studies. In this article, a novel fault diagnosis scheme based on optimized wavelet packet denoising and modulation signal bispectrum is proposed, which takes advantage of the transient impulse enhancement of wavelet packet denoising and the demodulation ability of modulation signal bispectrum to diagnose bearing faults more accurately. First, the measured signals are decomposed into a series of time–frequency subspaces using wavelet packet transform. An optimal threshold value is selected based on the proposed threshold criterion by considering unbiased autocorrelation of envelope and Gini index of the transient impulses. Subsequently, the subspaces are denoised by the wavelet packet denoising with the optimized threshold value, and the master subspaces that containing the fault-related transient impulses are selected based on the Gini index indicator. Finally, the modulation signal bispectrum is utilized to further purify the signal and extract the modulation components contained in the transient impulses, and the suboptimal modulation signal bispectrum slices are selected based on the characteristic frequency intensity coefficient. The modulation signal bispectrum detector is then obtained by averaging the suboptimal modulation signal bispectrum slices to determine the type of the bearing faults. The proposed wavelet packet denoising-modulation signal bispectrum is validated based on the simulation and experimental studies. Compared with the variational mode decomposition and Teager energy operator, fast kurtogram as well as conventional modulation signal bispectrum, the proposed wavelet packet denoising-modulation signal bispectrum method has superior performance in extracting the fault feature of the incipient defects on different bearing components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gearbox is a key component in mechanical transmission and faults on gears will lead to breakdowns and unscheduled downtime. Health condition monitoring and remaining useful life (RUL) prediction can provide sufficient leading time for gearbox timely maintenance. To some degree, the RUL prediction accuracy relies on the performance of the diagnostic features on reflecting the degradation of gears during its lifetime. However, most current commonly used features fail to reveal the fault mechanism hidden behind vibration signal and hold poor capability on noise cancellation. In this paper, modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) is proposed to reveal the signal modulation mechanism and monitor the health condition of gears. Then, an improved relevance vector machine (IMRVM) is introduced to realize the process of RUL prediction. Last, a run-to-failure test rig is designed to verify the effectiveness the MSB features for RUL prediction. Results show that MSB possesses better performance on denoising and capturing the weak variation due to modulation in gear system. The optimal MSB features after selection show better performance on reflecting the degradation of the gear and have higher prediction accuracy for gear RUL prediction comparing with RMS, kurtosis and so on. These findings provided more useful and practical information for gear RUL prediction and gearbox maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bearings are used as the most important load-carrying transmission components in various machines, thus subjecting to a number of faults including wear, fatigue pitting, cracks and so on. Fault detection and diagnosis of bearings can effectively prevent the machine from such typical failures and subsequent consequences. The faults in bearings can lead to the vibration signals that exhibit cyclostationary characteristics due to the inevitably random phase noise (or slippage between bearing components). In this article, a phase linearisation–based modulation signal bispectrum is proposed to tune up the cyclostationary bearing signal into a periodic waveform by linearizing the instantaneous phase of the narrow frequency band signals. In this way, the signal becomes more deterministic and modulation signal bispectrum can be effectively applied to suppression noise and obtain accurate and robust diagnosis results. As a result, this fault detector can achieve high performance in characterising the nonstationary bearing vibration signals and hence diagnose the bearing faults even in the case of extremely low signal-to-noise ratio (<−20 dB), which is benchmarked by the method of conventional modulation signal bispectrum in both simulation and experiment studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transient impulses are important information for machinery fault diagnosis. However, the transient features contained in the vibration signals generated by planetary gearboxes are usually immersed by a large amount of background noise and harmonic components. Even mathematical morphology (MM) is an excellent anti-noise signal processing method that can directly extract the geometry of impulse features in the time domain, but the four basic operators of MM can only extract one-way impulses while cannot extract the bidirectional impulses effectively at the same time. To accurately extract the impulse feature information, a novel method for fault detection of planetary gearbox based on an enhanced average (EAVG) filter and modulated signal bispectrum (MSB) is proposed. Firstly, the properties of the extracted impulses based on the four basic operators of MM will be divided into two categories of enhanced average operators. The four EAVG filters consist of the average weighted combination of enhanced average operators, and then the best EAVG filter is selected based on correlation coefficient to implement on the original vibration signal. It allows EAVG filter to extract positive and negative impulses of vibration signal, thereby improving the accuracy of planetary gearbox fault detection. Subsequently, the performance of the EAVG filter is influenced by the length of its structural element (SE), which is adaptively determined using an indicator based kurtosis. Then, the EAVG filter selects the optimal SE length to eliminate the interference of background noise and harmonic components to enhance the impulse components of the vibration signal. However, the nonlinear modulation components that are related to the fault types and severities are not extracted exactly and still remained in the filtered signal by EAVG. Finally, the MSB is utilized to the EAVG filtered signal to decompose the modulated components and extract the fault features. The advantages of EAVG over average (AVG) filter are clarified in the simulation study. In addition, the EAVG-MSB is validated by analyzing the vibration signals of planetary gearboxes with sun gear chipped tooth, sun gear misalignment and bearing inner race fault. The results indicate that the EAVG-MSB is effective and accurate in feature extraction compared with the combination morphological filter-hat transform (CMFH) and average combination difference morphological filter (ACDIF), and the feasibility of the EAVG-MSB are proved for planetary gearbox condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. • EAVG filter is used to extract the positive and negative impulses. • Kurtosis is taken as a novel criterion to optimize the SE length of EAVG. • MSB is used to extract fault feature for planetary gearbox fault detection. • Experimental results prove that the EAVG-MSB outperforms the ACDIF and CMFH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gears are important mechanical components for power transmissions. Tooth wear is one of the most common failure modes, which can present throughout a gear’s lifetime. It is significant to accurately monitor gear wear progression in order to take timely predictive maintenances. Motor current signature analysis (MCSA) is an effective and non-intrusive approach which is able to monitor faults from both electrical and mechanical systems. However, little research has been reported in monitoring the gear wear and estimating its severity based on MCSA. This paper presents a novel gear wear monitoring method through a modulation signal bispectrum based motor current signal analysis (MSB-MCSA). For a steady gear transmission, it is inevitable to exist load and speed oscillations due to various errors including wears. These oscillations can induce small modulations in the current signals of the driving motor. MSB is particularly effective in characterising such small modulation signals. Based on these understandings, the monitoring process was implemented based on the current signals from a run-to-failure test of an industrial two stages helical gearbox under a moderate accelerated fatigue process. At the initial operation of the test, MSB analysis results showed that the peak values at the bifrequencies of gear rotations and the power supply can be effective monitoring features for identifying faulty gears and wear severity as they exhibit agreeable changes with gear loads. A monotonically increasing trend established by these features allows a clear indication of the gear wear progression. The dismantle inspection at 477 h of operation, made when one of the monitored features is about 123% higher than its baseline, has found that there are severe scuffing wear marks on a number of tooth surfaces on the driving gear, showing that the gear endures a gradual wear process during its long test operation. Therefore, it is affirmed that the MSB-MSCA approach proposed is reliable and accurate for monitoring gear wear deterioration. [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]

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]

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]

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]

Envelope analysis is a widely used method for rolling element bearing fault detection. To obtain high detection accuracy, it is critical to determine an optimal frequency narrowband for the envelope demodulation. However, many of the schemes which are used for the narrowband selection, such as the Kurtogram, can produce poor detection results because they are sensitive to random noise and aperiodic impulses which normally occur in practical applications. To achieve the purposes of denoising and frequency band optimisation, this paper proposes a novel modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) based robust detector for bearing fault detection. Because of its inherent noise suppression capability, the MSB allows effective suppression of both stationary random noise and discrete aperiodic noise. The high magnitude features that result from the use of the MSB also enhance the modulation effects of a bearing fault and can be used to provide optimal frequency bands for fault detection. The Kurtogram is generally accepted as a powerful means of selecting the most appropriate frequency band for envelope analysis, and as such it has been used as the benchmark comparator for performance evaluation in this paper. Both simulated and experimental data analysis results show that the proposed method produces more accurate and robust detection results than Kurtogram based approaches for common bearing faults under a range of representative scenarios. [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]