Machine learning-based fault detection and diagnosis in electric motors

Abstract

Fault diagnosis is critical to any maintenance industry, as early fault detection can prevent catastrophic failures as well as a waste of time and money. In view of these objectives, vibration analysis in the frequency domain is a mature technique. Although well established, traditional methods involve a high cost of time and people to identify failures, causing machine learning methods to grow in recent years. The Machine learning (ML) methods can be divided into two large learning groups: supervised and unsupervised, with the main difference between them being whether the dataset is labeled or not. This study presents a total of four different methods for fault detection and diagnosis. The frequency analysis of the vibration signal was the first approach employed. This analysis was chosen to validate the future results of the ML methods. The Gaussian Mixture model (GMM) was employed for the unsupervised technique. A GMM is a probabilistic model in which all data points are assumed to be generated by a finite number of Gaussian distributions with unknown parameters. For supervised learning, the Convolution neural network (CNN) was used. CNNs are feedforward networks that were inspired by biological pattern recognition processes. All methods were tested through a series of experiments with real electric motors. Results showed that all methods can detect and classify the motors in several induced operation conditions: healthy, unbalanced, mechanical looseness, misalignment, bent shaft, broken bar, and bearing fault condition. Although all approaches are able to identify the fault, each technique has benefits and limitations that make them better for certain types of applications, therefore, a comparison is also made between the methods.