Sparse representation based latent components analysis for machinery weak fault detection

Weak machinery fault detection is a difficult task because of two main reasons (1) At the early stage of fault development, signature of fault related component performs incompletely and is quite different from that at the apparent failure stage. In most instances, it seems almost identical with the normal operating state. (2) The fault feature is always submerged and distorted by relatively strong background noise and macro-structural vibrations even if the fault component already performs completely, especially when the structure of fault components and interference are close. To solve these problems, we should penetrate into the underlying structure of the signal. Sparse representation provides a class of algorithms for finding succinct representations of signal that capture higher-level features in the data With the purpose of extracting incomplete or seriously overwhelmed fault components, a sparse representation based latent components decomposition method is proposed in this paper. As a special case of sparse representation, shift-invariant sparse coding algorithm provides an effective basis functions learning scheme for capturing the underlying structure of machinery fault signal by iteratively solving two convex optimization problems: an L1-regularized least squares problem and an L2-constrained least squares problem. Among these basis functions, fault feature can be probably contained and extracted if optimal latent component is filtered. The proposed scheme is applied to analyze vibration signals of both rolling bearings and gears. Experiment of accelerated lifetime test of bearings validates the proposed method's ability of detecting early fault. Besides, experiments of fault bearings and gears with heavy noise and interference show the approach can effectively distinguish subtle differences between defect and interference. All the experimental data are analyzed by wavelet shrinkage and basis pursuit de-noising (BPDN) method for comparison. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.