Industrial Engineering

Plant availability and reliability can be improved through a robust condition monitoring and fault diagnosis model to predict the current status (healthy or faulty) of any machines and critical assets. The model can then predict the exact fault for the faulty asset so that remedial maintenance can be carried out in a planned plant outage. Nowadays, the artificial intelligence (AI)-based machine learning (ML) model seems to be current trend to meet these requirements. Hence, the paper is also proposing such vibration-based faults diagnosis ML model through an experimental rotating rig. Here, the 2-Steps approach is used with the ML model to easy the industrial operation and maintenance process. The Step-1 provides the information about the asset health status such as healthy or faulty. The Step-2 then identifies the exact nature of fault to aid the decision making for the fault rectification and maintenance activities to avoid the risk of failure and enhance the reliability.

This article addresses an improvement of a classification procedure on cracked rotors through Deep learning based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). At first, a cracked rotor-bearing system is modeled by the finite element method (FEM), then throughout its start-up, the related time-domain responses are calculated numerically. In the following, as a pre-processing stage, continuous wavelet transform (CWT) and Short-time Fourier transform (STFT) are applied on the three various health conditions, i.e. without crack, shallow-cracked, and relatively deep-cracked shafts. The plots of CWT’s coefficients and STFT’s in these various classes are used as the input dataset in Deep learning based on CNNs and the three classes are introduced as the output. AlexNet with 25 layers is employed as the network. The results of the testing phase demonstrated that not only this expanded method has a reasonable capacity in the classification of cracked and healthy rotors, but it also can classify cracked rotors with different crack depths with a negligible error.

Orthotropic steel bridge decks and steel box girders are key structures of long-span bridges. Fatigue cracks often occur in these structures due to coupled factors of initial material flaws and dynamic vehicle loads, which drives the need for automating crack identification for bridge condition monitoring. With the use of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), the acquirement of bridge surface pictures is convenient, which facilitates the development of vision-based bridge condition monitoring. In this study, a combination of convolutional neural network (CNN) with fully convolutional network (FCN) is designed for crack identification and bridge condition monitoring. Firstly, 120 images are cropped into small patches to create a basic dataset. Subsequently, CNN and FCN models are trained for patch classification and pixel-level crack segmentation, respectively. In patch classification, some non-crack patches that contain complicated disturbance information, such as handwriting and shadow, are often mistakenly identified as cracks by directly using the CNN model. To address this problem, we propose a feedback-update strategy for CNN training, in which mistaken classification results of non-crack data are selected to update the training set to generate a new CNN model. By that analogy, several different CNN models are obtained and the accuracy of patch classification could be improved by using all models together. Finally, 80 test images are processed by the feedback-update CNN models and FCN model with a sliding window technique to generate crack identification results. Intersection over union (IoU) is calculated as an index to quantificationally evaluate the accuracy of the proposed method.

The asymmetry in the manufacturing and assembling is the common issue of rotor systems. Different degrees of errors are inevitable in alternating current (AC) motors, which causes degraded performances. Furthermore, around 80 % of mechanical faults link to rotor eccentricity. The eccentricity faults (EFs) generate excessive mechanical stress and then lead to fatigue in the other parts of the motor. Motor current signal analysis (MCSA) can be used to diagnose induction machine (IM) faults. As the EF leads to an unequal air gap when the rotor rotates, the inductance of IM also responds to the EF. Moreover, the dynamic load is a typical situation due to residual dynamic unbalance and misalignment. To study how EFs and dynamic load affect the stator current. The current model of symmetrical motor, asymmetrical motors with three-level EFs and with dynamic load are investigated numerically. The correctness of models is verified through experimental study. The results show the level of EF affects the sideband peak values significantly in the stator current spectrum. These findings will provide a foundation for the accurate diagnosis of motor health conditions.