Case Western Reserve University Bearing Research Articles

Fault diagnosis of railway freight car rolling bearings based on ACMD and improved MCKD

To address the issue of accurately extracting fault characteristic information of railway freight car bearings under noisy conditions, this paper proposes a fault diagnosis method based on Adaptive Chirp Mode Decomposition (ACMD) and an optimized Maximum Correlation Kurtosis Deconvolution (MCKD) using a Sparrow Search Algorithm Combining Sine-Cosine and Cauchy Mutation (SCSSA). Firstly, ACMD is used to decompose and reconstruct the original fault signal to obtain several Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). Then, the IMFs are filtered according to the Gini coefficient indicator, with the IMF having the largest Gini coefficient selected as the optimal component. Secondly, the SCSSA is employed to iteratively optimize the filter length L, fault signal period T, and displacement parameter M in the MCKD algorithm, determining the optimal parameter combination for MCKD. This avoids the limitations of manual settings and enhances the accuracy of fault diagnosis. The optimized MCKD is then applied to the optimal component, and deconvolution is performed using maximum correlation kurtosis as the criterion to extract fault characteristic information through its envelope spectrum. To verify the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed method, simulations, experimental signals from the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Center, and actual measured signals from railway freight car bearing 353130B are used to analyze inner ring faults. The experimental results demonstrate that the method can accurately extract fault characteristic information of railway freight car bearings under noise interference and identify the fault type.

A Multidimensional Health Indicator Based on Autoregressive Power Spectral Density for Machine Condition Monitoring.

Condition monitoring (CM) is the basis of prognostics and health management (PHM), which is gaining more and more importance in the industrial world. CM, which refers to the tracking of industrial equipment's state of health during operations, plays, in fact, a significant role in the reliability, safety, and efficiency of industrial operations. This paper proposes a data-driven CM approach based on the autoregressive (AR) modeling of the acquired sensor data and their analysis within frequency subbands. The number and size of the bands are determined with negligible human intervention, analyzing only the time-frequency representation of the signal of interest under normal system operating conditions. In particular, the approach exploits the synchrosqueezing transform to improve the signal energy distribution in the time-frequency plane, defining a multidimensional health indicator built on the basis of the AR power spectral density and the symmetric Itakura-Saito spectral distance. The described health indicator proved capable of detecting changes in the signal spectrum due to the occurrence of faults. After the initial definition of the bands and the calculation of the characteristics of the nominal AR spectrum, the procedure requires no further intervention and can be used for online condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. Since it is based on the comparison of spectra under different operating conditions, its applicability depends neither on the nature of the acquired signal nor on a specific system to be monitored. As an example, the effectiveness of the proposed method was favorably tested using real data available in the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Bearing Data Center, a widely known and used benchmark.

A Novel Wind Turbine Rolling Element Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Based on CEEMDAN and Improved TFR Demodulation Analysis

Among renewable energy sources, wind energy is regarded as one of the fastest-growing segments, which plays a key role in enhancing environmental quality. Wind turbines are generally located in remote and harsh environments. Bearings are a crucial component in wind turbines, and their failure is one of the most frequent reasons for system breakdown. Wind turbine bearing faults are usually very localized during their early stages which is precisely when they need to be detected. Hence, the early diagnosis of bearing faults holds paramount practical significance. In order to solve the problem of weak pulses being masked by noise in early failure signals of rolling element bearings, a novel fault diagnosis method is proposed based on the combination of complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN) and an improved TFR demodulation method. Initially, the decomposition of vibration signals using CEEMDAN is carried out to obtain several intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Subsequently, a novel KC indicator that combines kurtosis and the correlation function is designed to select the effective components for signal reconstruction. Finally, an innovative approach based on the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) for multi-scale demodulation analysis in the domain of time–frequency representation (TFR) is also introduced to extract the envelope spectrum. Further fault diagnosis can be achieved by the identification of the fault characteristic frequency (FCF). This study focuses on the theoretical exploration of bearing faults diagnosis algorithms, employing modeling and simulation techniques. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method are validated through the analysis of simulated signals and experimental signals provided by the Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS) of the University of Cincinnati and the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Bearing Data Center. The method demonstrates the capability to identify various types of bearing faults, including outer race and inner race faults, with a high degree of computational efficiency. Comparative analysis indicates a significant enhancement in fault diagnostic performance when compared to existing methods. This research contributes to the advancement of effective bearing fault diagnosis methodologies for wind turbines, thereby ensuring their reliable operation.

Fault Diagnosis Method for Rotating Machinery Based on Multi-scale Features

The vibration signals of rotating machinery usually contain various natural oscillation modes, exhibiting multi-scale features. This paper proposes a Multi-Branch one-dimensional deep Convolutional Neural Network model (MBCNN) that can extract multi-scale features from raw data hierarchically, thereby improving the diagnostic accuracy of gearbox faults in noisy environments. Meanwhile, the algorithms for multi-branch generation and algorithms of the convolution and pooling for each branch are deducted. The MBCNN integrates multiple branches with interrelated convolution kernels of different widths, and each branch can extract the high-level features of the signal. The network parameters of each branch are adjusted by the loss function, which makes the features of the branches complementary. Through the design of MBCNN, the local, global, deep layer and comprehensive information can be obtained from the raw data. On the widely used Case Western Reserve University Bearing Dataset, this paper conducted a performance comparison between the proposed MBCNN and other baselines including the shallow learning methods, 1D-CNN, and multi-scale feature learning methods. Moreover, our gearbox dataset was conducted on a fault diagnosis platform, and a series of experiments were conducted to verify the effectiveness and superiority of the MBCNN. The results indicate that the MBCNN can identify the faults in the gearbox with an accuracy of higher than 92%, and the average validation time per sample is less than 3.2 ms. In a noisy environment, the diagnostic accuracy can reach 90%. The proposed MBCNN provides an effective and intelligent detection method to identify the faults of rotating machinery in the manufacturing processes.

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on 2D grayscale images and Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Nets under unbalanced sample condition

Accurate diagnosis of rolling bearing faults plays a crucial role in ensuring the stable operation of rotating machinery systems. However, in actual engineering applications, a significant disparity between the volume of normal data and the quantity of fault data collected impairs diagnostic performance. Bearing fault diagnosis under sample imbalance conditions is an engineering challenge encountered in the field of fault diagnosis. To improve the fault diagnosis accuracy under unbalanced sample conditions, a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on 2D grayscale images and Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks (WGAN) is proposed. The method consists of three main steps. First, the acquired bearing vibration signals are transformed into 2D grayscale images. Second, the WGAN generation model is used to generate more fault samples. Finally, both the original samples and the generated samples are used to train the Convolutional Neural Networks classification model. The validity and effectiveness of the proposed method are evaluated and compared to other bearing fault diagnosis approaches using the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center dataset. The experimental results demonstrate the superior quality of the generated samples and the improved fault identification accuracy achieved by the proposed method.

Incorporating Heterogeneous Features into the Random Subspace Method for Bearing Fault Diagnosis.

In bearing fault diagnosis, machine learning methods have been proven effective on the basis of the heterogeneous features extracted from multiple domains, including deep representation features. However, comparatively little research has been performed on fusing these multi-domain heterogeneous features while dealing with the interrelation and redundant problems to precisely discover the bearing faults. Thus, in the current study, a novel diagnostic method, namely the method of incorporating heterogeneous representative features into the random subspace, or IHF-RS, is proposed for accurate bearing fault diagnosis. Primarily, via signal processing methods, statistical features are extracted, and via the deep stack autoencoder (DSAE), deep representation features are acquired. Next, considering the different levels of predictive power of features, a modified lasso method incorporating the random subspace method is introduced to measure the features and produce better base classifiers. Finally, the majority voting strategy is applied to aggregate the outputs of these various base classifiers to enhance the diagnostic performance of the bearing fault. For the proposed method's validity, two bearing datasets provided by the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center and Paderborn University were utilized for the experiments. The results of the experiment revealed that in bearing fault diagnosis, the proposed method of IHF-RS can be successfully utilized.

A Meta-Learning Method for Electric Machine Bearing Fault Diagnosis Under Varying Working Conditions With Limited Data

Effective detection of fault in rolling bearings with a limited amount of data is essential for the safe operation of electric machines. This article proposes a novel meta-learning-enabled method for the detection of fault in rolling bearings of electric machines under varying working conditions with limited data. The fault diagnosis under various working conditions is cast as a few-shot classification problem, which is solved using a model-agnostic meta-learning-based model. Specifically, a meta-learner is first trained using a series of interrelated fault-diagnosis tasks under various working conditions. During this stage, the gradient-by-gradient rule is utilized for parameter optimization to achieve an effective representation of these tasks. Then, the parameters of the meta-learner are refined on a new task. This technique can achieve fast adaptation to new tasks by utilizing only few-shot samples. The proposed method can obtain high fault-detection accuracy under various working conditions when only a limited amount of data is available. Comparative tests among various methods were carried out on the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Dataset and the Paderborn University Rolling Bearing Dataset. The results show that the proposed model performs better than other state-of-the-art methods under various working conditions; our method has stronger generalization ability and faster adaptation ability. The fault diagnosis accuracy for both datasets was at least 99%, which proves that the proposed strategy can be flexibly applied to various scenarios.

Improved broad learning system for machinery intelligent fault diagnosis with increasing fault samples, fault modes, and running conditions

Intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD) plays an indispensable role in protecting machinery from catastrophic accidents. Existing IFD methods are mainly developed in the framework of one-time learning. Therefore, they work under the hypothesis of complete dataset. Nevertheless, it is unrealistic to gain the complete dataset of machinery faults at once. More practically, new data will be progressively acquired over time. Therefore, it is urgently required to develop the incremental learning (IL) capabilities for IFD models to learn new knowledge continually from new data. For this purpose, this study proposes an improved broad learning system (IBLS) for lifelong learning IFD. Firstly, the initial IBLS is constructed based on the original broad learning system (BLS). Then, the IL capabilities of the IBLS are developed for three scenarios: increasing fault samples, increasing fault modes, and increasing running conditions. Based on these IL capabilities, the IBLS can be progressively updated to learn more and more diagnosis functions. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed IBLS is verified using three experiments of high-speed train bearing, disc component, and Case Western Reserve University bearing. The results show that the IBLS is capable of learning continually new knowledge from new data. Besides, the diagnosis accuracy of the IBLS is 12.45%, 7.84%, and 5.10% higher than that of the original BLS in the three case studies. The satisfying results prove that the proposed IBLS is a useful method to solve the lifelong learning IFD problem.

A deep boosted transfer learning method for wind turbine gearbox fault detection

Deep learning methods have become popular among researchers in the field of fault detection. However, their performance depends on the availability of big datasets. To overcome this problem researchers started applying transfer learning to achieve good performance from small available datasets, by leveraging multiple prediction models over similar machines and working conditions. However, the influence of negative transfer limits their application. Negative transfer among prediction models increases when the environment and working conditions are changing continuously. To overcome the effect of negative transfer, we propose a novel deep transfer learning method, coined deep boosted transfer learning, for wind turbine gearbox fault detection that prevents negative transfer and only focuses on relevant information from the source machine. The proposed method is an instance-based deep transfer learning method that updates the weights of the source and the target machine training samples separately. The weights of different source training samples are gradually decreased to reduce the impact on the final model. The proposed method is verified by the Case Western Reserve University bearing and real field wind farm datasets. The results show that the proposed method ignores negative transfer and achieves higher accuracy compared to standard deep learning and deep transfer learning methods.

Crack Size Identification for Bearings Using an Adaptive Digital Twin.

In this research, the aim is to investigate an adaptive digital twin algorithm for fault diagnosis and crack size identification in bearings. The main contribution of this research is to design an adaptive digital twin (ADT). The design of the ADT technique is based on two principles: normal signal modeling and estimation of signals. A combination of mathematical and data-driven techniques will be used to model the normal vibration signal. Therefore, in the first step, the normal vibration signal is modeled to increase the reliability of the modeling algorithm in the ADT. Then, to help challenge the complexity and uncertainty, the data-driven method will solve the problems of the mathematically based algorithm. Thus, first, Gaussian process regression is selected, and then, in two steps, we improve its resistance and accuracy by a Laguerre filter and fuzzy logic algorithm. After modeling the vibration signal, the second step is to design the data estimation for ADT. These signals are estimated by an adaptive observer. Therefore, a proportional-integral observer is then combined with the proposed technique for signal modeling. Then, in two stages, its robustness and reliability are strengthened using the Lyapunov-based algorithm and adaptive technique, respectively. After designing the ADT, the residual signals that are the difference between original and estimated signals are obtained. After that, the residual signals are resampled, and the root means square (RMS) signals are extracted from the residual signals. A support vector machine (SVM) is recommended for fault classification and crack size identification. The strength of the proposed technique is tested using the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Dataset (CWRUBD) under diverse torque loads, various motor speeds, and different crack sizes. In terms of fault diagnosis, the average detection accuracy in the proposed scheme is 95.75%. In terms of crack size identification for the roller, inner, and outer faults, the proposed scheme has average detection accuracies of 97.33%, 98.33%, and 98.33%, respectively.

A physics-informed deep learning approach for bearing fault detection

In recent years, advances in computer technology and the emergence of big data have enabled deep learning to achieve impressive successes in bearing condition monitoring and fault detection. While existing deep learning approaches are able to efficiently detect and classify bearing faults, most of these approaches depend exclusively on data and do not incorporate physical knowledge into the learning and prediction processes—or more importantly, embed the physical knowledge of bearing faults into the model training process, which makes the model physically meaningful. To address this challenge, we propose a physics-informed deep learning approach that consists of a simple threshold model and a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model for bearing fault detection. In the proposed physics-informed deep learning approach, the threshold model first assesses the health classes of bearings based on known physics of bearing faults. Then, the CNN model automatically extracts high-level characteristic features from the input data and makes full use of these features to predict the health class of a bearing. We designed a loss function for training and validating the CNN model that selectively amplifies the effect of the physical knowledge assimilated by the threshold model when embedding this knowledge into the CNN model. The proposed physics-informed deep learning approach was validated using (1) data from 18 bearings on an agricultural machine operating in the field, and (2) data from bearings on a laboratory test stand in the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Bearing Data Center.

Bearing Fault Feature Extraction and Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Feature Fusion

Bearing is one of the most important parts of rotating machinery with high failure rate, and its working state directly affects the performance of the entire equipment. Hence, it is of great significance to diagnose bearing faults, which can contribute to guaranteeing running stability and maintenance, thus promoting production efficiency and economic benefits. Usually, the bearing fault features are difficult to extract effectively, which results in low diagnosis performance. To solve the problem, this paper proposes a bearing fault feature extraction method and it establishes a bearing fault diagnosis method that is based on feature fusion. The basic idea of the method is as follows: firstly, the time-frequency feature of the bearing signal is extracted through Wavelet Packet Transform (WPT) to form the time-frequency characteristic matrix of the signal; secondly, the Multi-Weight Singular Value Decomposition (MWSVD) is constructed by singular value contribution rate and entropy weight. The features of the time-frequency feature matrix obtained by WPT are further extracted, and the features that are sensitive to fault in the time-frequency feature matrix are retained while the insensitive features are removed; finally, the extracted feature matrix is used as the input of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier for bearing fault diagnosis. The proposed method is validated by data sets from the time-varying bearing data from the University of Ottawa and Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center. The results show that the algorithm can effectively diagnose the bearing under the steady-state and unsteady state. This paper proposes that the algorithm has better fault diagnosis capabilities and feature extraction capabilities when compared with methods that aree based on traditional feature technology.

Induction Motor Bearing Fault Classification Using Extreme Learning Machine Based on Power Features

Electric motors perform the crucial task of converting electrical energy into essential mechanical energy on demand. Motors are plentifully used in the industrial sector all over the world to drive mechanical appliances. Despite being robust and sturdy, motors are not entirely fault-proof, and faults that are caused by the bearings trouble them the most. Early detection of these faults allows engineers to take preventive measures and avert hard breakdowns. Numerous studies have been conducted in this area of research. Many methods have been proposed and implemented to detect the existence and determine the type of fault present in an induction motor. However, this field of research is still open since there is room for improvements in the claimed results. In this paper, a novel fault diagnosis method has been proposed involving an emerging machine learning technique named extreme learning machine to identify the existence of flaws in motor bearings and specify their origins. The described method is tested on a benchmark bearing fault dataset provided by Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center. The acquired result yields a maximum classification accuracy of 99.86% and an average classification accuracy of 98.67% after being tested on multiple fault datasets.

Fault Detection Based on Multi-Dimensional KDE and Jensen-Shannon Divergence.

Weak fault signals, high coupling data, and unknown faults commonly exist in fault diagnosis systems, causing low detection and identification performance of fault diagnosis methods based on statistics or cross entropy. This paper proposes a new fault diagnosis method based on optimal bandwidth kernel density estimation (KDE) and Jensen–Shannon (JS) divergence distribution for improved fault detection performance. KDE addresses weak signal and coupling fault detection, and JS divergence addresses unknown fault detection. Firstly, the formula and algorithm of the optimal bandwidth of multidimensional KDE are presented, and the convergence of the algorithm is proved. Secondly, the difference in JS divergence between the data is obtained based on the optimal KDE and used for fault detection. Finally, the fault diagnosis experiment based on the bearing data from Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center is conducted. The results show that for known faults, the proposed method has and higher detection rate than statistics and the cross entropy method, respectively. For unknown faults, statistics cannot effectively detect faults, and the proposed method has approximately higher detection rate than the cross entropy method. Thus, the proposed method can effectively improve the fault detection rate.

Meta-learning for few-shot bearing fault diagnosis under complex working conditions

Deep learning-based bearing fault diagnosis has been systematically studied in recent years. However, the success of most of these methods relies heavily on massive labeled data, which is not always available in real production environments. Training a robust bearing fault diagnosis model with limited data and working well under complex working conditions remains a challenge. In this paper, a novel meta-learning fault diagnosis method (MLFD) based on model-agnostic meta-learning is proposed to address this issue. The raw signals of different working conditions are first converted to time–frequency images and then randomly sampled to form tasks for MLFD according to the protocol of meta-learning. The MLFD model acquires prior knowledge by optimizing initialization parameters based on multiple fault classification tasks of known working conditions during the meta-training process, and achieves fast and accurate few-shot bearing fault diagnosis under unseen working conditions by leveraging the learned knowledge. To comprehensively evaluate the performance of our method, a series of experiments were conducted to simulate different industrial scenarios based on the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Fault Benchmark, and the results demonstrate the superiority of MLFD in solving the few-shot fault classification problem under complex working conditions.

Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearing Using Wireless Sensor Networks and Convolutional Neural Network

Rolling bearings are widely used in modern production equipment. Effective bearing fault diagnosis method will improve the reliability of the machinery and increase its operating efficiency. In this paper, a novel fault diagnosis method based on WSN and CNN has been proposed to fully utilize the strong fault classification capability of CNN and the inherent merits of WSNs, such as relatively low cost, convenience of installation, and ease of relocation. The feasibility and effectiveness of proposed system are evaluated using the vibration data sets of seven motor operating conditions released by the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center. The experimental results show the fault diagnosis accuracy of the proposed approach can reach 97.6%.

An experimental methodology to evaluate machine learning methods for fault diagnosis based on vibration signals

This paper presents a systematic procedure to fairly compare experimental performance scores for machine learning methods for fault diagnosis based on vibration signals. In the vast majority of related scientific publications, the estimated accuracy and similar performance criteria are the sole quality parameter presented. However, the experimental design giving rise to these results is mostly biased, based on unacceptably simple validation methods and on recycling identical patterns in test data sets, previously used for training. Moreover, the methods in general overfit their hyperparameters, introducing additional overoptimistic results. In order to remedy this defect, we critically analyse the usual training-validation-test division and propose an algorithmic guideline in the form of a validation framework. This allows a well defined comparison of experimental results. In order to illustrate the ideas of the paper, the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data benchmark is used as a case study. Four distinct classifiers are experimentally compared, under gradually more difficult generalization tasks using the proposed evaluation framework: K-Nearest-Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, Random Forest and One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network. An extensive literature review suggests that most vibration based research papers, particularly for the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data, use similar patterns for training and testing, making their classification an easy task.

Application of Feature Fusion Using Coaxial Vibration Signal for Diagnosis of Rolling Element Bearings

The research of rolling element bearings (REBs) fault diagnosis based on single sensor vibration signal analysis is very common. However, the information provided by an individual sensor is very limited, and the robustness of the system is poor. In this paper, a novel fault diagnosis method based on coaxial vibration signal feature fusion (CVSFF) is proposed to fully analyze the multisensor information of the system and build a more reliable diagnostic system. An ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method is used to decompose the original vibration signal into a number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Then the autocorrelation analysis is introduced to reduce the random noise remaining in IMFs. After that, the Rényi entropy is calculated as the feature of bearings. Finally, the features of coaxial vibration signal are fused by a multiple-kernel learning support vector machine (MKL-SVM) to classify bearing conditions. In order to verify the effectiveness of the CVSFF method in REB diagnosis, eight data sets from the Case Western Reserve University Bearing Data Center are selected. The fault classification results demonstrate that the proposed approach is a valuable tool for bearing faults detection, and the fused feature from coaxial sensors improves fault classification accuracy for REBs.

A Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method Based on Dictionary Learning and Parameter-Optimized Support Vector Machine

Aiming at the problem of fault diagnosis, a novel method based on dictionary learning and parameter-optimized Support Vector Machine (SVM) was proposed in this paper and applied it to bearing fault diagnosis. Firstly, the collected bearing fault signals are transformed into gray images after data processing. Then, using dictionary learning, the gray images are denoised and output them as signal data. Finally, the SVM multi-classification model obtained by using Grid Search (GS) algorithm to optimize penalty parameter c and kernel function parameter g is used to classify and identify the fault type. This paper is based on data from Case Western Reserve University Bearing Center for experimental verification. The results show that the proposed model can continuously achieve the accuracy of 100% in the process of bearing fault diagnosis in different environments, which proves that the proposed method can accurately and effectively realize the fault diagnosis classification of bearings.

A Novel Bearing Fault Diagnosis Methodology Based on SVD and One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network

This paper constructs a novel network structure (SVD-1DCNN) based on singular value decomposition (SVD) and one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN), which takes the original signal as input to realize intelligent diagnosis of bearing faults. The output of the first convolution layer was also analyzed from the perspectives of time domain and time-frequency domain in the simulation experiment. Through qualitative analysis and quantitative analysis, it was found that the convolution kernel not only extracted the classification features of signals but also gradually highlighted the learned features in the network training process. Moreover, applying this network in fault diagnosis of bearing date provided by the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Bearing Data Center, it was found that the convolution kernel could also achieve the above operation. The novel network of this paper achieved a good classification effect on both the simulated signals and the measured signals.