An approach to performance assessment and fault diagnosis for rotating machinery equipment

Predict and prevent maintenance is routinely carried out. However, how to address the problem of performance assessment maximizing the use of available monitoring data, and how to build a framework that integrates performance assessment, fault detection, and diagnosis are still a significant challenge. For this purpose, this article introduces an approach to performance assessment and fault diagnosis for rotating machinery, including wavelet packet decomposition for extracting energy feature samples from vibration signals acquired during normal and faulty conditions; clustering analysis for demonstrating the separability of the samples; and Fisher discriminant analysis for providing an optimal lower-dimensional representation, in terms of maximizing the separability among different populations, by projecting the samples into a new space. In the new low-dimensional space, the Mahalanobis distance (MD) between the new measurement data and normal population can be calculated for performance assessment. Moreover, this model for performance assessment only requires data to be available in normal conditions and any one of all possible fault conditions, without the necessity for the full life cycle of condition monitoring data. In addition, if monitoring data under different fault conditions are available, the fault mode can be identified accurately by comparing the MDs between the new measurement data and each fault population. Finally, the proposed method was verified to be successful on performance assessment and fault diagnosis via a hydraulic pump test and a ball bearing test.