Robust optimized weights spectrum: Enhanced interpretable fault feature extraction method by solving frequency fluctuation problem

Abstract

Machine condition monitoring (MCM) plays a pivotal role in ensuring the reliability, safety, and efficiency of a production and operation system. Fault feature extraction (FFE), as an important step within MCM, aims to filter out interference components (ICs) and extract fault components (FCs) from raw signals. Consequently, it facilitates incipient fault detection and performance degradation assessment. A recently proposed optimized weights spectrum (OWS) provided a data-driven FFE methodology with a strong theoretical foundation, but it was found that the OWS is highly sensitive to a frequency fluctuation problem caused by rotational speed fluctuations and sensor errors, which may result in fake fault signatures. Therefore, a robust optimized weights spectrum (ROWS) is proposed in this paper to solve the frequency fluctuation problem. The ROWS is inspired by an intuitive idea that employs functions with adaptive frequency bandwidths instead of isolated spectral lines to represent frequency components, thus mitigating the impact of the frequency fluctuation problem. To adaptively determine the optimal parameters for these functions and estimate the corresponding ROWS, an alternative optimization strategy is adopted. Then, the proposed ROWS can be obtained when convergence conditions of this strategy are satisfied. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed ROWS are verified by three real-world cases, i.e., the proposed ROWS can solve the frequency fluctuation problem and provide robust results for interpretable FFE.