An integrated condition monitoring scheme for health state identification of a multi-stage gearbox through Hurst exponent estimates
Vamsi Inturi, Sai Venkatesh Balaji, Praharshitha Gyanam, Brahmini Priya Venkata Pragada, G. R. Sabareesh, Vikram Pakrashi
Abstract
The vibration and acoustic signals collected from rotating machinery are often non-stationary and aperiodic, and it is a challenge to post-process and extract the defect sensitive health indicators. In this paper, we demonstrate how the estimated Hurst exponent of such measured data can be advantageous for analyzing non-stationary and aperiodic data due to its self-similarity and scale-invariance properties. To illustrate this, the paper demonstrates detection of fault diagnostics of a multi-stage gearbox operating under fluctuating speeds through estimated Hurst exponent of the raw vibration and acoustic signals as a health indicator. Thirteen health states of the gearbox are considered, and the raw vibration and acoustic signals are collected. The Hurst exponents are calculated using three different approaches: generalized Hurst exponent (q = 1, 2, 3, and 4), rescale range statistical (R/S) analysis, and dispersion analysis from the vibration and acoustic signals. Three different health indicator datasets are formulated and subjected to feature learning through conventional machine-learning (decision tree and support vector machine) and advanced machine-learning (deep-learning) classifiers. The effectiveness of these datasets while discriminating between the health states of the gearbox is investigated, yielding classification accuracies of 96.4% when compared with the individual health indicator datasets. The ability of the fault diagnosis and defect severity analysis with reduced reliance on the signal post-processing algorithms is demonstrated.