FPGA-Microprocessor Based Sensor for Faults Detection in Induction Motors Using Time-Frequency and Machine Learning Methods.

Induction motors (IM) play a fundamental role in the industrial sector because they are robust, efficient, and low-cost machines. Changes in the environment, installation errors, or modifications to working conditions can generate faults in induction motors. The trend on IM fault detection is focused on the design techniques and sensors capable of evaluating multiple faults with various signals using non-invasive analysis. The methodology is based on processing electric current signals by applying the short-time Fourier transform (STFT). Additionally, the computation of the mean and standard deviation of infrared thermograms is proposed as main indicators. The proposed system combines both parameters by means of Support Vector Machine and k-nearest-neighbor classifiers. The development of the diagnostic system was done with digital hardware implementations using a Xilinx PYNQ Z2 card that integrates an FPGA with a microprocessor, thus taking advantage of the acquisition and processing of digital signals and images in hardware. The proposed method has proved to be effective for the classification of healthy (HLT), misalignment (MAMT), unbalance (UNB), damaged bearing (BDF), and broken rotor bar (BRB) faults with an accuracy close to 99%.

Power Disturbance Monitoring through Techniques for Novelty Detection on Wind Power and Photovoltaic Generation.

Novelty detection is a statistical method that verifies new or unknown data, determines whether these data are inliers (within the norm) or outliers (outside the norm), and can be used, for example, in developing classification strategies in machine learning systems for industrial applications. To this end, two types of energy that have evolved over time are solar photovoltaic and wind power generation. Some organizations around the world have developed energy quality standards to avoid known electric disturbances; however, their detection is still a challenge. In this work, several techniques for novelty detection are implemented to detect different electric anomalies (disturbances), which are k-nearest neighbors, Gaussian mixture models, one-class support vector machines, self-organizing maps, stacked autoencoders, and isolation forests. These techniques are applied to signals from real power quality environments of renewable energy systems such as solar photovoltaic and wind power generation. The power disturbances that will be analyzed are considered in the standard IEEE-1159, such as sag, oscillatory transient, flicker, and a condition outside the standard attributed to meteorological conditions. The contribution of the work consists of the development of a methodology based on six techniques for novelty detection of power disturbances, under known and unknown conditions, over real signals in the power quality assessment. The merit of the methodology is a set of techniques that allow to obtain the best performance of each one under different conditions, which constitutes an important contribution to the renewable energy systems.

Infrared Thermography Smart Sensor for the Condition Monitoring of Gearbox and Bearings Faults in Induction Motors.

The monitoring of machine conditions is very important from the viewpoints of productivity, economic benefits, and maintenance. Several techniques have been proposed in which sensors are the key to providing relevant information to verify the system. Recently, the smart sensor concept is common, in which the sensors are integrated with a data processing unit executing dedicated algorithms used to generate meaningful information about the system in situ. Additionally, infrared thermography has gained relevance in monitoring processes, since the new infrared cameras have more resolution, smaller dimensions, reliability, functionality, and lower costs. These units were firstly used as secondary elements in the condition monitoring of machines, but thanks to modern techniques for data processing, the infrared sensors can be used to give a first, or even a direct, diagnosis in a nonintrusive way in industrial applications. Therefore, in this manuscript, the structure and development of an infrared-thermography-based smart sensor for diagnosing faults in the elements associated with induction motors, such as rolling bearings and the gearbox, is described. The smart sensor structure includes five main parts: an infrared primary sensor, a preprocessing module, an image processing module, classification of faults, and a user interface. The infrared primary sensor considers a low-cost micro thermal camera for acquiring the thermal images. The processing modules and the classification module implement the data processing algorithms into digital development boards, enabling smart system characteristics. Finally, the interface module allows the final users to require the smart sensor to perform processing actions and data visualization, with the additional feature that the diagnosis report can be provided by the system. The smart sensor is validated in a real experimental test bench, demonstrating its capabilities in different case studies.

Diagnosis Methodology Based on Deep Feature Learning for Fault Identification in Metallic, Hybrid and Ceramic Bearings.

Scientific and technological advances in the field of rotatory electrical machinery are leading to an increased efficiency in those processes and systems in which they are involved. In addition, the consideration of advanced materials, such as hybrid or ceramic bearings, are of high interest towards high-performance rotary electromechanical actuators. Therefore, most of the diagnosis approaches for bearing fault detection are highly dependent of the bearing technology, commonly focused on the metallic bearings. Although the mechanical principles remain as the basis to analyze the characteristic patterns and effects related to the fault appearance, the quantitative response of the vibration pattern considering different bearing technology varies. In this regard, in this work a novel data-driven diagnosis methodology is proposed based on deep feature learning applied to the diagnosis and identification of bearing faults for different bearing technologies, such as metallic, hybrid and ceramic bearings, in electromechanical systems. The proposed methodology consists of three main stages: first, a deep learning-based model, supported by stacked autoencoder structures, is designed with the ability of self-adapting to the extraction of characteristic fault-related features from different signals that are processed in different domains. Second, in a feature fusion stage, information from different domains is integrated to increase the posterior discrimination capabilities during the condition assessment. Third, the bearing assessment is achieved by a simple softmax layer to compute the final classification results. The achieved results show that the proposed diagnosis methodology based on deep feature learning can be effectively applied to the diagnosis and identification of bearing faults for different bearing technologies, such as metallic, hybrid and ceramic bearings, in electromechanical systems. The proposed methodology is validated in front of two different electromechanical systems and the obtained results validate the adaptability and performance of the proposed approach to be considered as a part of the condition-monitoring strategies where different bearing technologies are involved.

Deep-Compact-Clustering Based Anomaly Detection Applied to Electromechanical Industrial Systems.

The rapid growth in the industrial sector has required the development of more productive and reliable machinery, and therefore, leads to complex systems. In this regard, the automatic detection of unknown events in machinery represents a greater challenge, since uncharacterized catastrophic faults can occur. However, the existing methods for anomaly detection present limitations when dealing with highly complex industrial systems. For that purpose, a novel fault diagnosis methodology is developed to face the anomaly detection. An unsupervised anomaly detection framework named deep-autoencoder-compact-clustering one-class support-vector machine (DAECC-OC-SVM) is presented, which aims to incorporate the advantages of automatically learnt representation by deep neural network to improved anomaly detection performance. The method combines the training of a deep-autoencoder with clustering compact model and a one-class support-vector-machine function-based outlier detection method. The addressed methodology is applied on a public rolling bearing faults experimental test bench and on multi-fault experimental test bench. The results show that the proposed methodology it is able to accurately to detect unknown defects, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods.

System for Tool-Wear Condition Monitoring in CNC Machines under Variations of Cutting Parameter Based on Fusion Stray Flux-Current Processing.

The computer numerical control (CNC) machine has recently taken a fundamental role in the manufacturing industry, which is essential for the economic development of many countries. Current high quality production standards, along with the requirement for maximum economic benefits, demand the use of tool condition monitoring (TCM) systems able to monitor and diagnose cutting tool wear. Current TCM methodologies mainly rely on vibration signals, cutting force signals, and acoustic emission (AE) signals, which have the common drawback of requiring the installation of sensors near the working area, a factor that limits their application in practical terms. Moreover, as machining processes require the optimal tuning of cutting parameters, novel methodologies must be able to perform the diagnosis under a variety of cutting parameters. This paper proposes a novel non-invasive method capable of automatically diagnosing cutting tool wear in CNC machines under the variation of cutting speed and feed rate cutting parameters. The proposal relies on the sensor information fusion of spindle-motor stray flux and current signals by means of statistical and non-statistical time-domain parameters, which are then reduced by means of a linear discriminant analysis (LDA); a feed-forward neural network is then used to automatically classify the level of wear on the cutting tool. The proposal is validated with a Fanuc Oi mate Computer Numeric Control (CNC) turning machine for three different cutting tool wear levels and different cutting speed and feed rate values.

Smart-Sensor for the Automatic Detection of Electromechanical Faults in Induction Motors Based on the Transient Stray Flux Analysis.

Induction motors are essential and widely used components in many industrial processes. Although these machines are very robust, they are prone to fail. Nowadays, it is a paramount task to obtain a reliable and accurate diagnosis of the electric motor health, so that a subsequent reduction of the required time and repairing costs can be achieved. The most common approaches to accomplish this task are based on the analysis of currents, which has some well-known drawbacks that may lead to false diagnosis. With the new developments in the technology of the sensors and signal processing field, the possibility of combining the information obtained from the analysis of different magnitudes should be explored, in order to achieve more reliable diagnostic conclusions, before the fault can develop into an irreversible damage. This paper proposes a smart-sensor that explores the weighted analysis of the axial, radial, and combination of both stray fluxes captured by a low-cost, easy setup, non-invasive, and compact triaxial stray flux sensor during the start-up transient through the short time Fourier transform (STFT) and characterizes specific patterns appearing on them using statistical parameters that feed a feature reduction linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and then a feed-forward neural network (FFNN) for classification purposes, opening the possibility of offering an on-site automatic fault diagnosis scheme. The obtained results show that the proposed smart-sensor is efficient for monitoring and diagnosing early induction motor electromechanical faults. This is validated with a laboratory induction motor test bench for individual and combined broken rotor bars and misalignment faults.

Deep-Learning-Based Methodology for Fault Diagnosis in Electromechanical Systems.

Fault diagnosis in manufacturing systems represents one of the most critical challenges dealing with condition-based monitoring in the recent era of smart manufacturing. In the current Industry 4.0 framework, maintenance strategies based on traditional data-driven fault diagnosis schemes require enhanced capabilities to be applied over modern production systems. In fact, the integration of multiple mechanical components, the consideration of multiple operating conditions, and the appearance of combined fault patterns due to eventual multi-fault scenarios lead to complex electromechanical systems requiring advanced monitoring strategies. In this regard, data fusion schemes supported with advanced deep learning technology represent a promising approach towards a big data paradigm using cloud-based software services. However, the deep learning models' structure and hyper-parameters selection represent the main limitation when applied. Thus, in this paper, a novel deep-learning-based methodology for fault diagnosis in electromechanical systems is presented. The main benefits of the proposed methodology are the easiness of application and high adaptability to available data. The methodology is supported by an unsupervised stacked auto-encoders and a supervised discriminant analysis.

Supportive Noninvasive Tool for the Diagnosis of Breast Cancer Using a Thermographic Camera as Sensor.

Breast cancer is the leading disease in incidence and mortality among women in developing countries. The opportune diagnosis of this disease strengthens the survival index. Mammography application is limited by age and periodicity. Temperature is a physical magnitude that can be measured by using multiple sensing techniques. IR (infrared) thermography using commercial cameras is gaining relevance in industrial and medical applications because it is a non-invasive and non-intrusive technology. Asymmetrical temperature in certain human body zones is associated with cancer. In this paper, an IR thermographic sensor is applied for breast cancer detection. This work includes an automatic breast segmentation methodology, to spot the hottest regions in thermograms using the morphological watershed operator to help the experts locate the tumor. A protocol for thermogram acquisition considering the required time to achieve a thermal stabilization is also proposed. Breast thermograms are evaluated as thermal matrices, instead of gray scale or false color images, increasing the certainty of the provided diagnosis. The proposed tool was validated using the Database for Mastology Research and tested in a voluntary group of 454 women of different ages and cancer stages with good results, leading to the possibility of being used as a supportive tool to detect breast cancer and angiogenesis cases.

Empirical mode decomposition and neural networks on FPGA for fault diagnosis in induction motors.

Nowadays, many industrial applications require online systems that combine several processing techniques in order to offer solutions to complex problems as the case of detection and classification of multiple faults in induction motors. In this work, a novel digital structure to implement the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) for processing nonstationary and nonlinear signals using the full spline-cubic function is presented; besides, it is combined with an adaptive linear network (ADALINE)-based frequency estimator and a feed forward neural network (FFNN)-based classifier to provide an intelligent methodology for the automatic diagnosis during the startup transient of motor faults such as: one and two broken rotor bars, bearing defects, and unbalance. Moreover, the overall methodology implementation into a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) allows an online and real-time operation, thanks to its parallelism and high-performance capabilities as a system-on-a-chip (SoC) solution. The detection and classification results show the effectiveness of the proposed fused techniques; besides, the high precision and minimum resource usage of the developed digital structures make them a suitable and low-cost solution for this and many other industrial applications.

Fused smart sensor network for multi-axis forward kinematics estimation in industrial robots.

Flexible manipulator robots have a wide industrial application. Robot performance requires sensing its position and orientation adequately, known as forward kinematics. Commercially available, motion controllers use high-resolution optical encoders to sense the position of each joint which cannot detect some mechanical deformations that decrease the accuracy of the robot position and orientation. To overcome those problems, several sensor fusion methods have been proposed but at expenses of high-computational load, which avoids the online measurement of the joint's angular position and the online forward kinematics estimation. The contribution of this work is to propose a fused smart sensor network to estimate the forward kinematics of an industrial robot. The developed smart processor uses Kalman filters to filter and to fuse the information of the sensor network. Two primary sensors are used: an optical encoder, and a 3-axis accelerometer. In order to obtain the position and orientation of each joint online a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is used in the hardware implementation taking advantage of the parallel computation capabilities and reconfigurability of this device. With the aim of evaluating the smart sensor network performance, three real-operation-oriented paths are executed and monitored in a 6-degree of freedom robot.

FPGA-based smart sensor for online displacement measurements using a heterodyne interferometer.

The measurement of small displacements on the nanometric scale demands metrological systems of high accuracy and precision. In this context, interferometer-based displacement measurements have become the main tools used for traceable dimensional metrology. The different industrial applications in which small displacement measurements are employed requires the use of online measurements, high speed processes, open architecture control systems, as well as good adaptability to specific process conditions. The main contribution of this work is the development of a smart sensor for large displacement measurement based on phase measurement which achieves high accuracy and resolution, designed to be used with a commercial heterodyne interferometer. The system is based on a low-cost Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) allowing the integration of several functions in a single portable device. This system is optimal for high speed applications where online measurement is needed and the reconfigurability feature allows the addition of different modules for error compensation, as might be required by a specific application.

FPGA-based fused smart-sensor for tool-wear area quantitative estimation in CNC machine inserts.

Manufacturing processes are of great relevance nowadays, when there is a constant claim for better productivity with high quality at low cost. The contribution of this work is the development of a fused smart-sensor, based on FPGA to improve the online quantitative estimation of flank-wear area in CNC machine inserts from the information provided by two primary sensors: the monitoring current output of a servoamplifier, and a 3-axis accelerometer. Results from experimentation show that the fusion of both parameters makes it possible to obtain three times better accuracy when compared with the accuracy obtained from current and vibration signals, individually used.

FPGA-based fused smart sensor for dynamic and vibration parameter extraction in industrial robot links.

Intelligent robotics demands the integration of smart sensors that allow the controller to efficiently measure physical quantities. Industrial manipulator robots require a constant monitoring of several parameters such as motion dynamics, inclination, and vibration. This work presents a novel smart sensor to estimate motion dynamics, inclination, and vibration parameters on industrial manipulator robot links based on two primary sensors: an encoder and a triaxial accelerometer. The proposed smart sensor implements a new methodology based on an oversampling technique, averaging decimation filters, FIR filters, finite differences and linear interpolation to estimate the interest parameters, which are computed online utilizing digital hardware signal processing based on field programmable gate arrays (FPGA).

A field programmable gate array-based reconfigurable smart-sensor network for wireless monitoring of new generation computer numerically controlled machines.

Computer numerically controlled (CNC) machines have evolved to adapt to increasing technological and industrial requirements. To cover these needs, new generation machines have to perform monitoring strategies by incorporating multiple sensors. Since in most of applications the online Processing of the variables is essential, the use of smart sensors is necessary. The contribution of this work is the development of a wireless network platform of reconfigurable smart sensors for CNC machine applications complying with the measurement requirements of new generation CNC machines. Four different smart sensors are put under test in the network and their corresponding signal processing techniques are implemented in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based sensor node.

FPGA-based fused smart sensor for real-time plant-transpiration dynamic estimation.

Plant transpiration is considered one of the most important physiological functions because it constitutes the plants evolving adaptation to exchange moisture with a dry atmosphere which can dehydrate or eventually kill the plant. Due to the importance of transpiration, accurate measurement methods are required; therefore, a smart sensor that fuses five primary sensors is proposed which can measure air temperature, leaf temperature, air relative humidity, plant out relative humidity and ambient light. A field programmable gate array based unit is used to perform signal processing algorithms as average decimation and infinite impulse response filters to the primary sensor readings in order to reduce the signal noise and improve its quality. Once the primary sensor readings are filtered, transpiration dynamics such as: transpiration, stomatal conductance, leaf-air-temperature-difference and vapor pressure deficit are calculated in real time by the smart sensor. This permits the user to observe different primary and calculated measurements at the same time and the relationship between these which is very useful in precision agriculture in the detection of abnormal conditions. Finally, transpiration related stress conditions can be detected in real time because of the use of online processing and embedded communications capabilities.