scholarly journals A Simple Condition Monitoring Method for Gearboxes Operating in Impulsive Environments

Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (7) ◽  
pp. 2115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Schmidt ◽  
Radoslaw Zimroz ◽  
Fakher Chaari ◽  
P. Stephan Heyns ◽  
Mohamed Haddar

Reliable condition indicators are necessary to perform effective diagnosis and prognosis. However, the vibration signals are often corrupted with non-Gaussian noise and rotating machines may operate under time-varying operating conditions. This impedes the application of conventional condition indicators. The synchronous average of the squared envelope is a relatively simple yet effective method to perform fault detection, fault identification and fault trending under constant and time-varying operating conditions. However, its performance is impeded by the presence of impulsive signal components attributed to impulsive noise or the presence of other damage modes in the machine. In this work, it is proposed that the synchronous median of the squared envelope should be used instead of the synchronous average of the squared envelope for gearbox fault diagnosis. It is shown on numerical and experimental datasets that the synchronous median is more robust to the presence of impulsive signal components and is therefore more reliable for estimating the condition of specific machine components.

Energies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 982 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Wu ◽  
Hong Wang ◽  
Guoqian Jiang ◽  
Ping Xie ◽  
Xiaoli Li

Health monitoring of wind turbine gearboxes has gained considerable attention as wind turbines become larger in size and move to more inaccessible locations. To improve the reliability, extend the lifetime of the turbines, and reduce the operation and maintenance cost caused by the gearbox faults, data-driven condition motoring techniques have been widely investigated, where various sensor monitoring data (such as power, temperature, and pressure, etc.) have been modeled and analyzed. However, wind turbines often work in complex and dynamic operating conditions, such as variable speeds and loads, thus the traditional static monitoring method relying on a certain fixed threshold will lead to unsatisfactory monitoring performance, typically high false alarms and missed detections. To address this issue, this paper proposes a reliable monitoring model for wind turbine gearboxes based on echo state network (ESN) modeling and the dynamic threshold scheme, with a focus on supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) vibration data. The aim of the proposed approach is to build the turbine normal behavior model only using normal SCADA vibration data, and then to analyze the unseen SCADA vibration data to detect potential faults based on the model residual evaluation and the dynamic threshold setting. To better capture temporal information inherent in monitored sensor data, the echo state network (ESN) is used to model the complex vibration data due to its simple and fast training ability and powerful learning capability. Additionally, a dynamic threshold monitoring scheme with a sliding window technique is designed to determine dynamic control limits to address the issue of the low detection accuracy and poor adaptability caused by the traditional static monitoring methods. The effectiveness of the proposed monitoring method is verified using the collected SCADA vibration data from a wind farm located at Inner Mongolia in China. The results demonstrated that the proposed method can achieve improved detection accuracy and reliability compared with the traditional static threshold monitoring method.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (11) ◽  
pp. 3270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baris Satar ◽  
Gokhan Soysal ◽  
Xue Jiang ◽  
Murat Efe ◽  
Thiagalingam Kirubarajan

Conventional methods such as matched filtering, fractional lower order statistics cross ambiguity function, and recent methods such as compressed sensing and track-before-detect are used for target detection by passive radars. Target detection using these algorithms usually assumes that the background noise is Gaussian. However, non-Gaussian impulsive noise is inherent in real world radar problems. In this paper, a new optimization based algorithm that uses weighted l 1 and l 2 norms is proposed as an alternative to the existing algorithms whose performance degrades in the presence of impulsive noise. To determine the weights of these norms, the parameter that quantifies the impulsiveness level of the noise is estimated. In the proposed algorithm, the aim is to increase the target detection performance of a universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) based passive radars by facilitating higher resolution with better suppression of the sidelobes in both range and Doppler. The results obtained from both simulated data with α stable distribution, and real data recorded by a UMTS based passive radar platform are presented to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm. The results show that the proposed algorithm provides more robust and accurate detection performance for noise models with different impulsiveness levels compared to the conventional methods.


Author(s):  
Hamed Moradi ◽  
Firooz Bakhtiari-Nejad ◽  
Majid Saffar-Avval ◽  
Aria Alasty

Stable control of water level of drum is of great importance for economic operation of power plant steam generator systems. In this paper, a linear model of the boiler unit with time varying parameters is used for simulation. Two transfer functions between drum water level (output variable) and feed-water and steam mass rates (input variables) are considered. Variation of model parameters may be arisen from disturbances affecting water level of drum, model uncertainties and parameter mismatch due to the variant operating conditions. To achieve a perfect tracking of the desired drum water level, two sliding mode controllers are designed separately. Results show that the designed controllers result in bounded values of control signals, satisfying the actuators constraints.


Author(s):  
Krzysztof Bernard Łukaszewski

The aim of the article is to demonstrate the relationship between the adaptive regulation of the heat exchange surface to specific operating conditions of a steam turbine condenser and the reliability and availability of this surface in a specific period of time. The article exemplifies the relationship between the settings of the condenser heat exchange surface and the resulting changes in the reliability structures of this surface. The method of creating a mathematical model of reliability estimation, which is characterized by the variability of the reliability structures of the heat exchange surface in relation to specific operating conditions in a specific period of time, was indicated. Then, exemplary simulations of the adaptation of reliability structures of specific pipe systems constituting the condenser’s heat exchange surface to specific processes of operation of this condenser are presented. The simulations refer to the time-varying thermal loads of the condenser, the time-varying mean thickness of the sediments, and changes in the temperature of the cooling water at the point of its intake over time. The adaptation of certain reliability structures consists in the adaptation of specific systems of pipes through which the cooling water flows to the currently existing operating conditions of the condenser in order to maintain the desired reliability of the heat exchange surface for a specified time. This is done by enabling or disabling the flow of cooling water through a given number of pipes in specific systems under given operating conditions. On the basis of computer simulations, the reliability functions, and the availability functions of the subsystem under consideration were estimated.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Keyan Liu ◽  
Weijie Dong ◽  
Huanyu Dong ◽  
Jia Wei ◽  
Shiwu Xiao

After renewable energy distributed generator (DG) is connected to the power grid, traditional diverse-electric-information-based fault diagnosis approaches are not suitable for an active distributed network (ADN) due to the weak characteristics of fault current. Thus, this paper proposes a comprehensive nonformula fault diagnostic approach of ADN using only voltage as input. In the preprocess, sequential forward selection (SFS) and sequential backward selection (SBS) are utilized to optimize the input feature matrix of the sample in order to reduce the information redundancy of multiple measuring points in ADN. Then, a single “1-a-1” support vector machine (SVM) classifier is used for fault identification, and a multi-SVM, with radial basis function (RBF) as the kernel function, is applied to identify the location and fault type. To prove the proposed method is adaptable for ADN, two direct drive fans are used as a DG to test the IEEE 33 node model at every 10% of the line under three operating conditions that include all cases of distributed power generation in ADN. Results comparing real-time and historical data show that the proposed multi-SVM model reaches an average fault type diagnosis accuracy of 97.27%, with a fault identification accuracy of 96%. A backpropagation neural network is then compared to the proposed model. The results show the superior performance of the SBS-SFS optimized multi-SVM. This model can be usefully applied to the fault diagnosis of new energy sources with distributed power access to distribution networks.


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