Discriminant Feature Extraction for Centrifugal Pump Fault Diagnosis

Raw statistical features can imitate the amplitude, average, energy and time, and frequency series distribution of a raw vibration signal. However, these raw statistical features are either not very sensitive to weak incipient faults or are unsuitable for more severe faults, thus affecting the fault detection and classification accuracy. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a discriminant feature extraction method for Centrifugal Pump (CP) fault diagnosis. In order to obtain the discriminant feature pool, the proposed method is divided into three phases. In the first phase, a healthy baseline signal is selected. In the second phase, the healthy baseline signal is cross-correlated with the CP vibration signals of different classes, and a set of new features are extracted from the resulting correlation sequence. In the third phase, raw hybrid features in time, frequency, and the time-frequency domain are extracted from both the healthy baseline signals and the CP vibration signals of different classes. The correlation coefficient is calculated between the raw hybrid feature pools, which results in a new set of discriminant features. Discriminant features help the machine learning classifiers to effectively detect and classify the data into its respective classes. Furthermore, the proposed method combines all these features into a single feature vector that forms a vulnerable feature pool. The vulnerable feature pool describes the CP's vulnerability to a fault and is provided as an input to a multiclass support vector machine (MSVM) for CP fault detection and classification. The experimental results illustrate that the accuracy obtained from the proposed method shows promising improvements over the state-of-the-art conventional methods.