A Novel Underdetermined Blind Source Separation Method and Its Application to Source Contribution Quantitative Estimation.

To identify the major vibration and radiation noise, a source contribution quantitative estimation method is proposed based on underdetermined blind source separation. First, the single source points (SSPs) are identified by directly searching the identical normalized time-frequency vectors of mixed signals, which can improve the efficiency and accuracy in identifying SSPs. Then, the mixing matrix is obtained by hierarchical clustering, and source signals can also be recovered by the least square method. Second, the optimal combination coefficients between source signals and mixed signals can be calculated based on minimum redundant error energy. Therefore, mixed signals can be optimally linearly combined by source signals via the coefficients. Third, the energy elimination method is used to quantitatively estimate source contributions. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified via numerical case studies and experiments with a cylindrical structure, and the results show that source signals can be effectively recovered, and source contributions can be quantitatively estimated by the proposed method.

An enhanced data visualization method for diesel engine malfunction classification using multi-sensor signals.

The various multi-sensor signal features from a diesel engine constitute a complex high-dimensional dataset. The non-linear dimensionality reduction method, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), provides an effective way to implement data visualization for complex high-dimensional data. However, irrelevant features can deteriorate the performance of data visualization, and thus, should be eliminated a priori. This paper proposes a feature subset score based t-SNE (FSS-t-SNE) data visualization method to deal with the high-dimensional data that are collected from multi-sensor signals. In this method, the optimal feature subset is constructed by a feature subset score criterion. Then the high-dimensional data are visualized in 2-dimension space. According to the UCI dataset test, FSS-t-SNE can effectively improve the classification accuracy. An experiment was performed with a large power marine diesel engine to validate the proposed method for diesel engine malfunction classification. Multi-sensor signals were collected by a cylinder vibration sensor and a cylinder pressure sensor. Compared with other conventional data visualization methods, the proposed method shows good visualization performance and high classification accuracy in multi-malfunction classification of a diesel engine.

Customized multiwavelets for planetary gearbox fault detection based on vibration sensor signals.

Planetary gearboxes exhibit complicated dynamic responses which are more difficult to detect in vibration signals than fixed-axis gear trains because of the special gear transmission structures. Diverse advanced methods have been developed for this challenging task to reduce or avoid unscheduled breakdown and catastrophic accidents. It is feasible to make fault features distinct by using multiwavelet denoising which depends on the feature separation and the threshold denoising. However, standard and fixed multiwavelets are not suitable for accurate fault feature detections because they are usually independent of the measured signals. To overcome this drawback, a method to construct customized multiwavelets based on the redundant symmetric lifting scheme is proposed in this paper. A novel indicator which combines kurtosis and entropy is applied to select the optimal multiwavelets, because kurtosis is sensitive to sharp impulses and entropy is effective for periodic impulses. The improved neighboring coefficients method is introduced into multiwavelet denoising. The vibration signals of a planetary gearbox from a satellite communication antenna on a measurement ship are captured under various motor speeds. The results show the proposed method could accurately detect the incipient pitting faults on two neighboring teeth in the planetary gearbox.

DecouplingNet: A Stable Knowledge Distillation Decoupling Net for Fault Detection of Rotating Machines Under Varying Speeds.

Fault detection, also known as anomaly detection (AD), is at the heart of prediction and health management (PHM), which plays a vital role in ensuring the safe operation of mechanical equipment. Nonetheless, the lack of anomaly data creates a significant obstacle to the AD of the mechanical system. In particular, the complex modulation effects induced by time-varying speeds make AD much more challenging. For rapid and accurate AD, a stable knowledge distillation decoupling net (DecouplingNet) is provided to overcome these difficulties. First, an adversarial network consisting of an encoder, a decoder, and an encoder-discriminator is developed to model normal samples well by imposing constraints on the latent space. Then, a causal decoupling framework is suggested to disentangle equipment state-related information from operating conditions-related features, enabling stable condition monitoring at varying speeds. Finally, feature-based knowledge distillation is employed to boost the efficiency of AD while maintaining the detection accuracy. The proposed method is tested on two experimental scenarios and compared with some typical AD methods. The finding demonstrates that the net outperforms others in terms of accuracy and efficiency when it comes to detecting anomalies in the mechanical equipment that runs under varying speeds.

Causal Disentanglement: A Generalized Bearing Fault Diagnostic Framework in Continuous Degradation Mode.

In recent years, the identification of out-of-distribution faults has become a hot topic in the field of intelligent diagnosis. Existing researches usually adopt domain adaptation methods to complete the generalization of diagnostic knowledge with the aid of target domain data, but the acquisition of fault samples in real industries is extremely time-consuming and costly. Moreover, most researches focus on samples with fixed fault levels, ignoring the fact that system degradation is a continuous process. In response to the above intractable problems, this article proposed a causal disentanglement network (CDN) to realize cross-machine knowledge generalization and continuous degradation mode diagnosis. In CDN, multitask instance normalization and batch normalization structure was proposed to learn task-specific knowledge and enhance the informativeness of the extracted features. On this basis, a causal disentanglement loss was proposed, which minimized the mutual information of features between subtask structures and captured the causal invariant fault information for better generalization. The experimental results proved the superiority and generalization ability of CDN, and the visualization results proved the performance of CDN in causality mining.

Multi-mode non-Gaussian variational autoencoder network with missing sources for anomaly detection of complex electromechanical equipment.

Anomaly detection is crucial to the safety of complex electromechanical equipment. With the rapid accumulation of industrial data, intelligent methods without human intervention have become the mainstream of anomaly detection. Among them, variational autoencoder (VAE) performs well in anomaly detection with missing fault samples due to the self-supervised learning paradigm. However, the data from electromechanical equipment is usually non-Gaussian, making it difficult for the standard VAE based on Gaussian distribution to recognize the abnormal states. To solve the above problems, we proposed multi-mode non-Gaussian VAE (MNVAE) to detect anomalies from unknown distribution vibration signals without fault samples or prior knowledge. Firstly, the encoder maps the input to a Gaussian mixture distribution in latent space and samples a latent variable from it, after which the Householder Flow is applied to the latent variable to capture more abundant features. Finally, to describe the non-Gaussianity of the signal, Weibull distribution serves as the likelihood function of the reconstructed signal output from the decoder and as the basis for anomaly discrimination. In comparison to 6 related methods, our method yields the best results across various datasets. Through further experiments, the robustness of our method is proved and the proposed improvements are effective.

Whitening-Net: A Generalized Network to Diagnose the Faults Among Different Machines and Conditions.

Intelligent bearing diagnostic methods are developing rapidly, but they are difficult to implement due to the lack of real industrial data. A feasible way to deal with this problem is to train a network through laboratory data to mine the causality of bearing faults. This means that the constructed network can handle domain deviations caused by the change of machines, working conditions, noise, and so on which is, however, not a simple task. In response to this problem, a new domain generalization framework-Whitening-Net-was proposed in this article. This framework first defined the homologous compound domain signal as the data basis. Subsequently, the causal loss was proposed to impose regularization constraints on the network, which enhances the network's ability to mine causality. To avoid domain-specific information from interfering with causal mining, a whitening structure was proposed to whiten the domain, prompting the network to pay more attention to the causality of the signal rather than the domain noise. The results of diagnosis and interpretation proved the ability of Whitening-Net in mining causal mechanisms, which shows that the proposed network can generalize to different machines, even if the tested working conditions and bearing types are completely different from the training domains.

A multi-branch redundant adversarial net for intelligent fault diagnosis of multiple components under drastically variable speeds.

Intelligent fault diagnosis with small training samples plays an important role in the safety of mechanical equipment. However, affected by sharp speed variation, fault feature is extremely weak, which raises difficulty for fault diagnosis. The mutual coupling of multi-component fault features further increases the difficulty. Considering the ability of redundant second generation wavelet transform in non-stationary feature extraction, a multi-branch redundant adversarial net (RedundancyNet) is proposed to address the above issues. The Net consists of discriminator, the generator based on redundant reconstruction, and the classifier based on redundant decomposition. Firstly, through adversarial training process, the generator fuses multi-scale features to generate the signal with varying speeds, thereby expanding training data. Secondly, through layer-by-layer multi-resolution feature enhancement, the classifier boosts weak fault features of vibration signals at variable speeds. Finally, a multi-branch framework is proposed to realize multi-component fault location and damage identification. The proposed method is validated on two cases. The average classification accuracy in the two cases reach 97.14% and 98.33% respectively. However, other end-to-end intelligent fault diagnosis methods for varying speeds or small samples can only reach the highest classification accuracy of 95.14% in Case 1 and 93.59% in Case2, which is much less than RedundancyNet. The analysis results highlight the effectiveness of the net under drastically variable speeds and small faulty training samples. Besides, the proposed classifier is easy to understand, which reveals the process of feature learning and the extracted feature under varying speeds.

A novel unknown-input and single-output approach to extract vibration patterns via a roving continuous random excitation.

Operating deflection shape analysis allows investigating the dynamic behaviour of a structure during operation. It normally requires simultaneous, multi-point measurements to capture the response from an unknown excitation source (unknown-input and multiple-output), which can complicate its usage for structures without ease of access. A novel vibration pattern testing method is proposed based on a roving continuous random excitation employing a small robotic Hexbug device and a single-point measurement. The Hexbug introduces a random excitation in consecutive locations while roaming over the structure. The resulting multi-modal, time and location dependent response of the system is captured in a single location, and then analysed with a newly developed method based on empirical wavelet transform, multiscale morphological filtering and optimization to extract the excited vibration patterns. The efficiency of the proposed method is experimentally demonstrated on a free-free and a cantilevered beam with comparison to mode shapes extracted by hammer test. The validation highlights its ability to extract several vibration patterns from a long slender structure with good accuracy and robustness, with the general ability to expand the usability of an operating deflecting shape analysis.

Sparsity-based signal extraction using dual Q-factors for gearbox fault detection.

Early detection of faults developed in gearboxes is of great importance to prevent catastrophic accidents. In this paper, a sparsity-based feature extraction method using the tunable Q-factor wavelet transform with dual Q-factors is proposed for gearbox fault detection. Specifically, the proposed method addresses the problem of simultaneously extracting periodic transients and high-resonance component from noisy data for the gearboxes fault detection purpose. Firstly, a sparse optimization problem is formulated to jointly estimate the useful components from the noisy observation. In order to promote wavelet sparsity, non-convex regularizations are employed in the cost function of the optimization problem. Then, a fast converging, computationally efficient iterative algorithm which termed SpaEdualQA (the sparsity-based signal extraction algorithm using dual Q-factors) is developed to solve the formulated optimization problem. The derivation of the proposed fast algorithm combines the split augmented Lagrangian shrinkage algorithm (SALSA) with majorization-minimization (MM). Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed SpaEdualQA is validated by analyzing numerical signals and real data collected from engineering fields. The results demonstrated that the proposed SpaEdualQA can effectively extract periodic transients and high-resonance component from noisy vibration signals.