Proposal of a new method for learning of diesel generator sounds and detecting abnormal sounds using an unsupervised deep learning algorithm

Abstract

This study is to find a method to learn engine sound after the start-up of a diesel generator installed in nuclear power plant with an unsupervised deep learning algorithm (CNN autoencoder) and a new method to predict the failure of a diesel generator using it. In order to learn the sound of a diesel generator with a deep learning algorithm, sound data recorded before and after the start-up of two diesel generators was used. The sound data of 20 min and 2 h were cut into 7 s, and the split sound was converted into a spectrogram image. 1200 and 7200 spectrogram images were created from sound data of 20 min and 2 h, respectively. Using two different deep learning algorithms (CNN autoencoder and binary classification), it was investigated whether the diesel generator post-start sounds were learned as normal. It was possible to accurately determine the post-start sounds as normal and the pre-start sounds as abnormal. It was also confirmed that the deep learning algorithm could detect the virtual abnormal sounds created by mixing the unusual sounds with the post-start sounds. This study showed that the unsupervised anomaly detection algorithm has a good accuracy increased about 3% with comparing to the binary classification algorithm.