Convolutional Neural Network Based Fault Detection for Rotating Machinery

Vibration analysis is a well-established technique for condition monitoring of rotating machines as the vibration patterns differ depending on the fault or machine condition. Currently, mainly manually-engineered features, such as the ball pass frequencies of the raceway, RMS, kurtosis an crest, are used for automatic fault detection. Unfortunately, engineering and interpreting such features requires a significant level of human expertise. To enable non-experts in vibration analysis to perform condition monitoring, the overhead of feature engineering for specific faults needs to be reduced as much as possible. Therefore, in this article we propose a feature learning model for condition monitoring based on convolutional neural networks. The goal of this approach is to autonomously learn useful features for bearing fault detection from the data itself. Several types of bearing faults such as outer-raceway faults and lubrication degradation are considered, but also healthy bearings and rotor imbalance are included. For each condition, several bearings are tested to ensure generalization of the fault-detection system. Furthermore, the feature-learning based approach is compared to a feature-engineering based approach using the same data to objectively quantify their performance. The results indicate that the feature-learning system, based on convolutional neural networks, significantly outperforms the classical feature-engineering based approach which uses manually engineered features and a random forest classifier. The former achieves an accuracy of 93.61 percent and the latter an accuracy of 87.25 percent. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.