Sparse Tensor Decomposition of Multi-Sensory Data for Fault Localization in Rotating Machinery Health Monitoring

Abstract

Multi-sensor monitoring is prevalent in modern structural health monitoring (SHM) practice. As the number of sensors and sampling requirements increase, a monitoring sensor network can generate substantial data which are high-volume and high-dimensional, especially for large structure and machinery. In condition-based monitoring (CBM) of rotating machines, e.g., gas turbine, rotor fault diagnosis serves a significant role in the system reliability, safety, and efficiency, which helps reduce potential damage to the on-rotor structures and avoid catastrophic failures. For multi-channel vibration measurement, classical rotor diagnosis approaches typically involve data fusion techniques based on cross spectral analysis for identifying spectral correlation, e.g., cross power spectral density, and/or matrix analysis tool for dimensionality reduction, e.g., principal component analysis. The operation on vectors or matrices may limit their effectiveness for higher-order array or tensor data. To circumvent this limitation, the third order vibrational spectral tensor is generated by representing the multi-channel acceleration spectra as the three-way array. Through nonnegative Tucker decomposition (NTD), the spectral tensor is decomposed into multiple principal factors: the spectral factor, segmental factor, channel-wise factor, and the dense tensor core. The correlations across the characteristic spectral contents and the sensor channels are revealed by the factorization, which enables the diagnosis of rotor fault and facilitates fault localization by identifying the dominant channels of the characteristic spectral factor. The method is validated on an experimental rotor testbed where the faulty channel with crack, rub, or misalignment fault, is effectively localized via 4-channel vibration measurements, which presents a promising approach for multi-sensor fusion and fault diagnosis in rotating machinery health monitoring.