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This article uses acoustic emission (AE) analysis to diagnose an industrial-scale and slow-speed wind turbine blade bearing. The main challenge for AE analysis is that the fault signals are mingled with heavy noise. As a result, the objective of this article is to filter the raw AE signals and extract weak fault signals. To achieve this goal, a general linear and nonlinear auto-regressive (GLNAR) model is first developed to exploit the nonlinear characteristics of the AE signals. Then, the sparse augmented Lagrangian (SAL) algorithm is applied to learn the built GLNAR model and filter the raw AE signals. The characteristics of SAL is that it is a novel sparse representation technique which can convert the original filtering problem into a number of suboptimization problems, and these subproblems can be solved separately. Finally, as the blade bearing rotates at fluctuating speeds, the filtered signals are resampled so that the bearing fault type can be diagnosed in the order domain. The proposed diagnostic framework was validated in several experiments under time-varying low-speed and heavy-blade-load conditions. The results indicate that our proposed methods are effective and accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remaining useful life (RUL) prediction has been increasingly considered in many industrial fields for the reliability and safety of their systems. As a data analysis tool of deep learning, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) shows great potential for RUL prediction. This paper proposes an intelligent RUL prediction method based on a double-CNN model architecture. Given the powerful feature extraction capability of CNN, the proposed method is fed with original vibration signals with no need to resort to any feature extractor, which can also retain the useful information in maximum. The prediction includes two stages: first, incipient fault point is identified by the first CNN model and a proposed “3/5” principle; then, the second CNN model is constructed for RUL prediction. In practice, RULs of identical components are different from each other, which poses a major challenge in RUL prediction. To overcome this problem, an intermediate reliability variable is first calculated in this paper, instead of directly predicting the RUL value. Then, a mapping algorithm is proposed to map reliability to RUL. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, data of four tests of bearing degradation are utilized for RUL prediction. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method shows higher prediction accuracy and robustness. The prediction results and evaluation indexes demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fault diagnosis under time-varying operational conditions is always the challenge in industrial systems. The chirplet transform (CT) provides an effective first-order approximation approach, but the slow operation speed and the drawback for high-order signal analysis limit its uses. Focusing on this problem, a fast nonlinear chirplet dictionary-based sparse decomposition (FNC-SD) method for nonlinear signal analysis is proposed. By replacing the time–frequency inclination parameter in the CT with a frequency bending parameter, the proposed method can track the nonstationary signals by arbitrary order polynomial law with time by an additional degree. Considering that too many parameters will slow down the operation speed, a frequency bending operator estimation algorithm is also proposed in this paper based on the calculated rotating frequency. Therefore, a laser vibrometer is needed in the experiment to collect the impulse signals, which can represent rotating speed signals. Then, the FNC-SD method is used to construct a redundant dictionary for signal sparse time–frequency representation. The high similarity between signals and atoms can make the method prefer to choose the right atoms, instead of being influenced by noise. Therefore, the proposed method also shows a strong noise robustness. Two simulation experiments are constructed to verify the performance of the proposed method. Finally, the FNC-SD method is used to diagnose a faulty motor with broken bar. The analyzed results and comparisons with respect to the state-of-the-art methods are illustrated in detail, as well as the convergence accuracy and speed, which highlight the superiority of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As wind power attracts increasing attention and wind turbines (WTs) capacity expands, fault diagnosis of WT is playing a more and more important role in improving reliability, minimizing down time, reducing maintenance costs, and providing reliable power generation. In this paper, a novel sparse time-frequency representation (STFR) method is proposed to increase the diagnostic precision of incipient faults. The proposed method can be applied once the condition is detected as abnormal according to the VDI3834 vibration threshold standard in WT fault diagnosis systems. The proposed method is a novel signal representation method based on the sparse representation theory and Wigner–Ville distribution (WVD), which can overcome the limitations of traditional basis functions expansion and time-frequency analysis methods. In this method, a union of redundant dictionary (URD) is constructed on the basis of the underlying prior information of the oscillate characteristics with multicomponent coupling effect and different morphological waveforms. Therefore, the vibration signal can be sparsely represented over the URD. Then, the sparse coefficients and corresponding atoms can be obtained by solving the basis pursuit denoising problem via alternating direction method of multipliers. Based on the combination of the WVD of each atom and corresponding sparse coefficient, the time-frequency distribution of the vibration signal can be obtained. To verify the effectiveness of the STFR method, a simulation and two field tests in the wind farm are performed. The comparison results with state-of-the-art methods illustrate the superiority and robustness of the proposed method in the engineering applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Machine fault diagnosis collects massive amounts of vibration data about complex mechanical systems. Performing feature detection from these data sets has already led to a major challenge. Compressive sensing theory is a new sampling framework that provides an alternative to the well-known Shannon sampling theory. This theory enables the recovery of sparse or compressible signals from a small set of nonadaptive linear measurements. However, it is suboptimal to recover the whole signals from the compressive measurements and then solve feature identification problems through traditional DSP techniques. Thus, a novel mechanical feature identification method is proposed in this paper. Its main advantage is that fault features are extracted directly in the compressive measurement domain without sacrificing accuracy, while a significant reduction in the dimensionality of the measurement data is achieved. Moreover, Gaussian white noises are significantly alleviated, which dramatically enhances the reliability of machine fault diagnosis. Parameter analysis is also profoundly investigated through a set of numerical experiments. Numerical simulations and experiments are further performed to prove the reliability and effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]