Detecting and Learning Unknown Fault States by Automatically Finding the Optimal Number of Clusters for Online Bearing Fault Diagnosis

This paper proposes an online fault diagnosis system for bearings that detect emerging fault modes and then updates the diagnostic system knowledge (DSK) to incorporate information about the newly detected fault modes. New fault modes are detected using k-means clustering along with a new cluster evaluation method, i.e., multivariate probability density function’s cluster distribution factor (MPDFCDF). In this proposed model, a heterogeneous pool of features is constructed from the signal. A hybrid feature selection model is adopted for selecting optimal feature for learning the model with existing fault mode. The proposed online fault diagnosis system detects new fault modes from unknown signals using k-means clustering with the help of proposed MPDFCDF cluster evaluation method. The DSK is updated whenever new fault modes are detected and updated DSK is used to classify faults using the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classifier. The proposed model is evaluated using acoustic emission signals acquired from low-speed rolling element bearings with different fault modes and severities under different rotational speeds. Experimental results present that the MPDFCDF cluster evaluation method can detect the optimal number of fault clusters, and the proposed online diagnosis model can detect newly emerged faults and update the DSK effectively, which improves the diagnosis performance in terms of the average classification performance.