scholarly journals Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Bearings Using Ensemble Learning: The Impact of Diversity in Base Learners and Features

Author(s):  
Junchuan Shi ◽  
Tianyu Yu ◽  
Kai Goebel ◽  
Dazhong Wu

Abstract Prognostics and health management (PHM) of bearings is crucial for reducing the risk of failure and the cost of maintenance for rotating machinery. Model-based prognostic methods develop closed-form mathematical models based on underlying physics. However, the physics of complex bearing failures under varying operating conditions is not well understood yet. To complement model-based prognostics, data-driven methods have been increasingly used to predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of bearings. As opposed to other machine learning methods, ensemble learning methods can achieve higher prediction accuracy by combining multiple learning algorithms of different types. The rationale behind ensemble learning is that higher performance can be achieved by combining base learners that overestimate and underestimate the RUL of bearings. However, building an effective ensemble remains a challenge. To address this issue, the impact of diversity in base learners and extracted features in different degradation stages on the performance of ensemble learning is investigated. The degradation process of bearings is classified into three stages, including normal wear, smooth wear, and severe wear, based on the root-mean-square (RMS) of vibration signals. To evaluate the impact of diversity on prediction performance, vibration data collected from rolling element bearings was used to train predictive models. Experimental results have shown that the performance of the proposed ensemble learning method is significantly improved by selecting diverse features and base learners in different degradation stages.

Author(s):  
Pradeep Lall ◽  
Hao Zhang ◽  
Lynn Davis

The reliability consideration of LED products includes both luminous flux drop and color shift. Previous research either talks about luminous maintenance or color shift, because luminous flux degradation usually takes very long time to observe. In this paper, the impact of a VOC (volatile organic compound) contaminated luminous flux and color stability are examined. As a result, both luminous degradation and color shift had been recorded in a short time. Test samples are white, phosphor-converted, high-power LED packages. Absolute radiant flux is measured with integrating sphere system to calculate the luminous flux. Luminous flux degradation and color shift distance were plotted versus aging time to show the degradation pattern. A prognostic health management (PHM) method based on the state variables and state estimator have been proposed in this paper. In this PHM framework, unscented kalman filter (UKF) was deployed as the carrier of all states. During the estimation process, third order dynamic transfer function was used to implement the PHM framework. Both of the luminous flux and color shift distance have been used as the state variable with the same PHM framework to exam the robustness of the method. Predicted remaining useful life is calculated at every measurement point to compare with the tested remaining useful life. The result shows that state estimator can be used as the method for the PHM of LED degradation with respect to both luminous flux and color shift distance. The prediction of remaining useful life of LED package, made by the states estimator and data driven approach, falls in the acceptable error-bounds (20%) after a short training of the estimator.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e795
Author(s):  
Pooja Vinayak Kamat ◽  
Rekha Sugandhi ◽  
Satish Kumar

Remaining Useful Life (RUL) estimation of rotating machinery based on their degradation data is vital for machine supervisors. Deep learning models are effective and popular methods for forecasting when rotating machinery such as bearings may malfunction and ultimately break down. During healthy functioning of the machinery, however, RUL is ill-defined. To address this issue, this study recommends using anomaly monitoring during both RUL estimator training and operation. Essential time-domain data is extracted from the raw bearing vibration data, and deep learning models are used to detect the onset of the anomaly. This further acts as a trigger for data-driven RUL estimation. The study employs an unsupervised clustering approach for anomaly trend analysis and a semi-supervised method for anomaly detection and RUL estimation. The novel combined deep learning-based anomaly-onset aware RUL estimation framework showed enhanced results on the benchmarked PRONOSTIA bearings dataset under non-varying operating conditions. The framework consisting of Autoencoder and Long Short Term Memory variants achieved an accuracy of over 90% in anomaly detection and RUL prediction. In the future, the framework can be deployed under varying operational situations using the transfer learning approach.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 613
Author(s):  
Bangcheng Zhang ◽  
Yubo Shao ◽  
Zhenchen Chang ◽  
Zhongbo Sun ◽  
Yuankun Sui

Real-time prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) is one of the most essential works inprognostics and health management (PHM) of the micro-switches. In this paper, a lineardegradation model based on an inverse Kalman filter to imitate the stochastic deterioration processis proposed. First, Bayesian posterior estimation and expectation maximization (EM) algorithm areused to estimate the stochastic parameters. Second, an inverse Kalman filter is delivered to solvethe errors in the initial parameters. In order to improve the accuracy of estimating nonlinear data,the strong tracking filtering (STF) method is used on the basis of Bayesian updating Third, theeffectiveness of the proposed approach is validated on an experimental data relating tomicro-switches for the rail vehicle. Additionally, it proposes another two methods for comparisonto illustrate the effectiveness of the method with an inverse Kalman filter in this paper. Inconclusion, a linear degradation model based on an inverse Kalman filter shall deal with errors inRUL estimation of the micro-switches excellently.


Energies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 3318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lixiao Cao ◽  
Zheng Qian ◽  
Hamid Zareipour ◽  
David Wood ◽  
Ehsan Mollasalehi ◽  
...  

Wind-powered electricity generation has grown significantly over the past decade. While there are many components that might impact their useful life, the gearbox and generator bearings are among the most fragile components in wind turbines. Therefore, the prediction of remaining useful life (RUL) of faulty or damaged wind turbine bearings will provide useful support for reliability evaluation and advanced maintenance of wind turbines. This paper proposes a data-driven method combining the interval whitenization method with a Gaussian process (GP) algorithm in order to predict the RUL of wind turbine generator bearings. Firstly, a wavelet packet transform is used to eliminate noise in the vibration signals and extract the characteristic fault signals. A comprehensive analysis of the real degradation process is used to determine the indicators of degradation. The interval whitenization method is proposed to reduce the interference of non-stationary operating conditions to improve the quality of health indicators. Finally, the GP method is utilized to construct the model which reflects the relationship between the RUL and health indicators. The method is assessed using actual vibration datasets from two wind turbines. The prediction results demonstrate that the proposed method can reduce the effect of non-stationary operating conditions. In addition, compared with the support vector regression (SVR) method and artificial neural network (ANN), the prediction accuracy of the proposed method has an improvement of more than 65.8%. The prediction results verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.


2020 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-79
Author(s):  
Bartosz Stanisław Przybyła ◽  
Radoslaw Przysowa ◽  
Zbigniew Zapałowicz

Purpose EC-135P2+ helicopters operated by Polish Medical Air Rescue are highly exposed to environmental particles entering engines when performing helicopter emergency medical services. This paper aims to assess the effectiveness of inlet barrier filters installed to protect the engines, including their impact on maintenance. Design/methodology/approach The organisation adopted a comprehensive set of measures to predict and limit the impact of dust ingestion including visual inspections, health management and engine trend monitoring based on ground power checks’ (GPC) results. Three alternative particle separation solutions were considered. Finally, helicopter inlets were modified to allow the selected filter system to be installed, which reduced the number of particles ingested by the engine and prevented from premature overhauls. Findings The analyses carried out enabled not only the selection of the optimal filtration solution and its seamless implementation into the fleet but also confirmed its efficiency. After installing the filters, engines’ lifetime is extended from 500 to 4,500 flight hours while operating costs and the number of maintenance tasks was reduced significantly. Originality/value Lessons learned from operational experience show that a well-matched particle separation system can mitigate accelerated engine deterioration even if the platform is continuously exposed to environmental particles. The remaining useful life of engines can be predicted using performance models and data from GPC.


Author(s):  
Shah M. Limon ◽  
Om Prakash Yadav

Prediction of remaining useful life using the field monitored performance data provides a more realistic estimate of life and helps develop a better asset management plan. The field performance can be monitored (indirectly) by observing the degradation of the quality characteristics of a product. This paper considers the gamma process to model the degradation behavior of the product characteristics. An integrated Bayesian approach is proposed to estimate the remaining useful life that considers accelerated degradation data to model degradation behavior first. The proposed approach also considers interaction effects in a multi-stress scenario impacting the degradation process. To reduces the computational complexity, posterior distributions are estimated using the MCMC simulation technique. The proposed method has been demonstrated with an LED case example and results show the superiority of Bayesian-based RUL estimation.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Himanshu Sharma ◽  
Veronica Adetola ◽  
Laurentiu Marinovici ◽  
Herbert T. Schaef

Abstract Due to the increased penetration of renewable energy generation sources, and fluctuations of the oil and gas prices, modern coal burning power plants deal with increased variability in the demand for power generation. These varying demands result in their intermittent under-capacity operation (cycling). Periodical ramping down and back up to follow the daily power demands causes damages to the plant components reducing its operational life. In this paper we analyze the impact of cycling on a rotary Ljungstrom air preheater (APH) unit installed at a coal fire power plant in the US. An inefficient air preheater can significantly impact boiler performance. Due to the repeated boiler’s hot-cold start, the APH experiences fluctuating operating conditions that result in accelerated degradation mechanisms, such as dew-point corrosion, fouling/deposition plugging, and air heater leakage. The analysis in this paper utilizes field data related to APH basket replacement, and the number of cycles experienced by the boiler to model the life expectancy of the baskets. The data-driven model enables preventive maintenance strategies for the APH by predicting how long the APH baskets will last in a probabilistic sense. The analysis showed that an increase in cycling for a fixed operation time can reduce the APH basket remaining useful life by about 30%.


Author(s):  
Feng Yang ◽  
Mohamed Salahuddin

Prognostics and health management (PHM) methodologies are increasingly playing active roles in improving the availability, reliability, efficiency, productivity, and safety of systems in many industries. In predicting the remaining useful life (RUL), this chapter introduces a prognostics framework with health index (HI) formulation, with specific emphasis on incorporating and validating nonlinear HI degradations. The key issue to the success of this framework is how to identify appropriate parameters in describing the behavior of the nonlinear HI degradations. Using exponential HI degradation as an example in predicting the RULs of induction motors, this chapter discusses three different explorations in verifying the existence of good parameter values as well as identifying the appropriate parameters automatically. Comprehensive experiments were carried out with degradation process (DP) data from eight induction motors, and it was discovered that good parameters can be automatically determined with the proposed parameter identification method.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bo Wu ◽  
Wei Li ◽  
Ming-quan Qiu

Aiming at reducing the production downtime and maintenance cost, prognostics and health management (PHM) of rotating machinery often includes the remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of bearings. In this paper, a method combining the generalized Weibull failure rate function (WFRF) and radial basis function (RBF) neural network is developed to deal with the RUL prediction of bearings. A novel indicator, namely, the power value on the sensitive frequency band (SFB), is proposed to track bearing degradation process. Generalized WFRF is used to fit the degradation indicator series to reduce the effect of noise and avoid areas of fluctuation in the time domain. RBF neural network is employed to predict the RUL of bearings with times and fitted power values at present and previous inspections as input. Meanwhile, the life percentage is selected as output. The performance of the proposed method is validated by an accelerated bearing run-to-failure experiment, and the results demonstrate the advantage of this method in achieving more accurate RUL prediction.


Author(s):  
Robert M. Vandawaker ◽  
David R. Jacques ◽  
Jason K. Freels

Across many industries, systems are exceeding their intended design lives, whether they are ships, bridges or military aircraft. As a result failure rates can increase and unanticipated wear or failure conditions can arise. Health monitoring research and application has the potential to more safely lengthen the service life of a range of systems through utilization of sensor data and knowledge of failure mechanisms to predict component life remaining. A further benefit of health monitoring when combined across an entire platform is system health management. System health management is an enabler of condition based maintenance, which allows repair or replacement based on material condition, not a set time. Replacement of components based on condition can enable cost savings through fewer parts being used and the associated maintenance costs. The goal of this research is to show the management of system health can provide savings in maintenance and logistics cost while increasing vehicle availability through the approach of condition based maintenance.This work examines the impact of prediction accuracy uncertainty in remaining useful life prognostics for a squadron of 12 aircraft. The uncertainty in this research is introduced in the system through an uncertainty factor applied to the useful life prediction. An ARENA discrete event simulation is utilized to explore the effect of prediction error on availability, reliability, and maintenance and logistics processes. Aircraft are processed through preflight, flight, and post-flight operations, as well as maintenance and logistics activities. A baseline case with traditional time driven maintenance is performed for comparison to the condition based maintenance approach of this research.This research does not consider cost or decision making processes, instead focusing on utilization parameters of both aircraft and manpower. The occurrence and impact of false alarms on system performance is examined. The results show the potential availability, reliability, and maintenance benefits of a health monitoring system and explore the diagnostic uncertainty.


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