Estimation of the remaining useful life (RUL) of bearings is important to avoid abrupt shutdowns in rotary machines. An important task in RUL estimation is the construction of a suitable health indicator (HI) to infer the bearing condition. Conventional health indicators rely on features of the vibration acceleration signal and are predominantly calculated without considering its non-stationary nature. This often results in an HI with a trend that is difficult to model, as well as random fluctuations and poor correlation with bearing degradation. Therefore, this paper presents a method for constructing a bearing’s HI by considering the non-stationarity of the vibration acceleration signals. The proposed method employs the discrete wavelet packet transform (DWPT) to decompose the raw signal into different sub-bands. The HI is extracted from each sub-band signal, smoothened using locally weighted regression, and evaluated using a gradient-based method. The HIs showing the best trends among all the sub-bands are iteratively accumulated to construct an HI with the best trend over the entire life of the bearing. The proposed method is tested on two benchmark bearing datasets. The results show that the proposed method yields an HI that correlates well with bearing degradation and is relatively easy to model.

The simultaneous occurrence of various types of defects in bearings makes their diagnosis more challenging owing to the resultant complexity of the constituent parts of the acoustic emission (AE) signals. To address this issue, a new approach is proposed in this paper for the detection of multiple combined faults in bearings. The proposed methodology uses a deep neural network (DNN) architecture to effectively diagnose the combined defects. The DNN structure is based on the stacked denoising autoencoder non-mutually exclusive classifier (NMEC) method for combined modes. The NMEC-DNN is trained using data for a single fault and it classifies both single faults and multiple combined faults. The results of experiments conducted on AE data collected through an experimental test-bed demonstrate that the DNN achieves good classification performance with a maximum accuracy of 95%. The proposed method is compared with a multi-class classifier based on support vector machines (SVMs). The NMEC-DNN yields better diagnostic performance in comparison to the multi-class classifier based on SVM. The NMEC-DNN reduces the number of necessary data collections and improves the bearing fault diagnosis performance.

A new method is established to construct the 2-D fault diagnosis representation of multiple bearing defects from 1-D acoustic emission signals. This technique starts by applying envelope analysis to extract the envelope signal. A novel strategy is propounded for the deployment of the continuous wavelet transform with damage frequency band information to generate the defect signature wavelet image (DSWI), which describes the acoustic emission signal in time-frequency-domain, reduces the nonstationary effect in the signal, shows discriminate pattern visualization for different types of faults, and associates with the defect signature of bearing faults. Using the resultant DSWI, the deep convolution neural network (DCNN) architecture is designed to identify the fault in the bearing. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, the performance of this technique is scrutinized by a series of experimental tests acquired from a self-designed testbed and corresponding to different bearing conditions. The performance from the experimental dataset demonstrates that the suggested methodology outperforms conventional approaches in terms of classification accuracy. The result of combining the DCNN with DSWI input yields an accuracy of 98.79% for classifying multiple bearing defects.

Advances in technology have enhanced the ability to detect leakages in boiler tube components in thermal power plants. As a specific issue, the interaction between the coal fuel stream and the boiler tube membrane generates random and high-amplitude impulses, which negatively affect the measured acoustic emission (AE) signal from leakages. It is essential to detect and practically handle these kinds of impulses. Based on the object detection concept, this paper proposes an impulse detection methodology that employs deep learning flexible boundary regression (DLFBR). First, the shape extraction (SE) preprocessing technique is implemented to yield the shape signal, which contains intrinsic information about the impulse from the raw AE signal. Then, DLFBR extracts and generates both the feature map and the confidence mask from the shape signal to regress a boundary box, which specifies the position of the impulse. For illustration purposes, the proposed algorithm is applied to an experimental leakage detection dataset recorded from a subcritical boiler unit with a tube membrane. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for detecting impulses of leakage in a boiler tube testbed, providing 99.8% average classification accuracy.

Acoustic emission bursts are signal waveforms that include a number of consecutive imbrication transients with variable strengths and contain crucial information on the leakage phenomenon in a pipeline system. Detection and isolation of a burst against the background signal increases the ability of a pipe’s fault diagnosis system. This paper proposes a methodology using the Enhanced Constant Fault Alarm Rate (ECFAR) to detect bursts and exploit the burst phenomenon in acoustic emission. The extracted information from the burst waveform is used to distinguish several levels of leakage in a laboratory leak-off experimental testbed. The multi-class support vector machine in the one-against-all method is established as the classifier. The results are compared with those of the wavelet threshold-based method, another algorithm utilized for impulse and burst detection, which indicates that the ECFAR method gives an ameliorative classification result with an accuracy of 93% for different levels of leakage.

Bearings are complex components with onlinear behavior that are used to mitigate the effects of inertia. These components are used in various systems, including motors. Data analysis and condition monitoring of the systems are important methods for bearing fault diagnosis. Therefore, a deep learning-based adaptive neural-fuzzy structure technique via a support vector autoregressive-Laguerre model is presented in this study. The proposed scheme has three main steps. First, the support vector autoregressive-Laguerre is introduced to approximate the vibration signal under normal conditions and extract the state-space equation. After signal modeling, an adaptive neural-fuzzy structure observer is designed using a combination of high-order variable structure techniques, the support vector autoregressive-Laguerre model, and adaptive neural-fuzzy inference mechanism for normal and abnormal signal estimation. The adaptive neural-fuzzy structure observer is the main part of this work because, based on the difference between signal estimation accuracy, it can be used to identify faults in the bearings. Next, the residual signals are generated, and the signal conditions are detected and identified using a convolution neural network (CNN) algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed deep learning-based adaptive neural-fuzzy structure technique by support vector autoregressive-Laguerre model was analyzed using the Case Western Reverse University (CWRU) bearing vibration dataset. The proposed scheme is compared to five state-of-the-art techniques. The proposed algorithm improved the average pattern recognition and crack size identification accuracy by 1.99%, 3.84%, 15.75%, 5.87%, 30.14%, and 35.29% compared to the combination of the high-order variable structure technique with the support vector autoregressive-Laguerre model and CNN, the combination of the variable structure technique with the support vector autoregressive-Laguerre model and CNN, the combination of RAW signal and CNN, the combination of the adaptive neural-fuzzy structure technique with the support vector autoregressive-Laguerre model and support vector machine (SVM), the combination of the high-order variable structure technique with the support vector autoregressive-Laguerre model and SVM, and the combination of the variable structure technique with the support vector autoregressive-Laguerre model and SVM, respectively.