An Industrial Internet Application for Real-Time Fault Diagnosis in Industrial Motors

Abstract

Being able to detect, identify, and diagnose a fault is a key feature of industrial supervision systems, which enables advance asset management, in particular, predictive maintenance, which greatly increases efficiency and productivity. In this paper, an Industrial Internet app for real-time fault detection and diagnosis is implemented and tested in a pilot scale industrial motor. Real-time fault detection and identification is based on dynamic incremental principal component analysis (DIPCA) and reconstruction-based contribution (RBC). When the analysis indicates that one of the vibration measurements is responsible for the fault, a convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to identify the unbalance or bearing fault type. The application was evaluated in its three functionalities: fault detection, fault identification, and fault identification of vibration-related faults, yielding a fault detection rate over 99%, a false alarm rate below 5%, and an identification accuracy over 90%. Note to Practitioners —This paper focuses on designing and evaluating a real-time fault diagnosis application in an industrial setup. To this end, this paper also tackles the problem of developing a methodology for implementing advanced state-of-the-art fault detection techniques in real machinery, following industry standards and using a modern informatics architecture. The application here developed uses a statistical data-driven fault diagnosis technique, hence it requires a training stage using historical data to learn patterns and estimate parameters. A proof of concept in fault diagnosis for industrial motors is given; however, it should be noted that both the methodology and the deployed architecture are scalable and flexible enough to facilitate the implementation in other industrial environments. The implementation here presented was deployed using only open-source tools, which allows evaluating this tool without incurring in high expenses.