Cavitation Analysis in Centrifugal Pumps Based on Vibration Bispectrum and Transfer Learning

Detection of cavitation in centrifugal pumps is critical in their condition monitoring. In order to detect cavitation more accurately and confidently, more advanced signal processing techniques are needed. For the classification of a pump conditions based on the outputs of these techniques, advanced machine learning techniques are needed. In this research, an automatic system for cavitation detection is proposed based on machine learning. Bispectral analysis is used for analyzing the vibration signals. The resulting bispectrum images are given to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as inputs. The CNNs are a pretrained AlexNet and a pretrained GoogleNet, which are used in this application through transfer learning. On the contrary, a laboratory test setup is used for generating controlled cavitation in a centrifugal pump. The suggested algorithm is implemented on the vibration dataset acquired from the laboratory pump test setup. The results show that the cavitation state of the pump can be detected accurately using this system without any need to image processing or feature extraction.