3.1. Simulation Data Description
The simulated data are generated from an object representing a drivetrain, which includes a driving shaft associated with referential speed, a one-stage parallel gearbox, a power take-off shaft, and a rolling element bearing (REB). The gearbox is a speed reduction with 23 teeth on the driving shaft gear and 67 teeth on the power take-off shaft gear. The total transmission ratio is 23/67 = 0.34328. The simulated object operates at three nominal speeds of 3000, 4200, and 6000 rpm with a typical minor speed fluctuation of around 12 rpm.
The simulated data represent eight modes of object structural failures. The list of existing modes is presented in
Table 1. Each failure mode is represented by Failure Development Function (FDF) defining the evolution of a particular fault. For the generation of vibrational signals in mode, the simulated object requires 3 FDFs, which indicate the shaft, gearbox, or bearing faults. The FDFs for nominal velocity of 3000 rpm are presented in
Figure 5. Each mode contains 150 independent vibrational signals, 10 s. long with a sampling frequency of 25 kHz. Along with the vibrational signal, the object generates a phase marker signal to determine the instantaneous speed.
The simulated model consists of two elements—a synthetic model of vibration signal and a synthetic model of development of particular fault of rotary machinery. Depending on the simulated fault mode, consecutive vibration signals are modified differently. Each vibration signal is constructed as a phenomenological-behavioral model with generalized angular deterministic (GAD) [
41] shaft components (AM-FM harmonics) and gearbox components (AM-FM harmonics with multiple double sidebands), as well as generalized angular–temporal deterministic (GATD) [
42] rolling-element bearings components (AM-FM cyclo-nonstationary components with additional phase-locked amplitude modulation). Fault development is modeled as a combination of linear, 2nd order polynomial, or exponential growth of amplitudes of individual signal components with relatively low (MODE 2–7) and relatively high variance (MODE 8), as presented in
Figure 5. More about the simulated object and the generated signals can be found in the book [
30].
3.2. Signal Processing and Feature Extraction
During years of research related to condition monitoring (CM), many signal processing and feature extraction algorithms have been proposed. From the fundamental calculation of filtered raw signal root mean square (RMS) to more sophisticated as spectral kurtosis. The detailed description of the various algorithms are described in works [
3,
30,
43].
The choice of signal processing methods for simulation data was based on contextual knowledge. Much of the damage manifests itself in the presence of additional harmonics at specific frequencies. Therefore, spectral analysis was introduced, and the signal was resampled into the order domain based on the phase marker information.
The imbalance is manifested by an increase in the fundamental harmonic amplitude, directly related to the rotational velocity. The raw signal from the generator is supposed to imitate the acceleration waveform. Therefore, to obtain the velocity signal, one must perform the numerical integration operation.
The last applied processing algorithm was time-synchronous analysis, often used to detect gear failure in Vibro-diagnostics. The detailed list of signal processing algorithms and extracted features is gathered in
Table 2. The normalized trends for three modes are presented in
Figure 6.
3.3. Model Training
After extracting the features described in the
Table 2, authors started developing ND models. For this work, four different models were developed based on algorithms described in
Section 2. Those models were:
Unidimensional distribution-based (UDDB) model,
Nearest-neighbor (NN) model,
The Online Novelty and Drift Detection Algorithm (OLINDDA) based model,
Auto-associative neural networks (AANNs) ensemble,
The ND models were trained on features extracted for the first mode of failure (see
Section 3.1), which represented a healthy machine. The training dataset was randomly split in the ratio: 70% for training purposes and 30% for testing false-positive responses. The training and testing subsets in feature space are presented in
Figure 7.
The fourth model consisting ensemble composed of 15 AANNs was trained, using the Oveproduce-and-Choose method, in the following manner. For the development of the ensemble, 100 networks were trained on previously split sets. After this process, 15 networks with the best score on the testing set (lowest number of false-positive classification) were selected for ensemble construction.
The models were trained on a computer containing an Intel Core i7-8750H CPU with 16 GB of RAM. The development times for each model are included in
Table 3. The training time allocated to Ensemble is distinguishing from other models due to algorithm construction. For UDDB, NN and OLINDDA, exactly one model was developed, while for Ensemble, up to 100 different networks were trained.
3.4. Results of Model Evaluation
All trained models were evaluated on simulated vibrational data, which contained failure modes from 2 to 8 (5) for three rotational velocities. Since the results for each rotational speed were similar, the article presents those selected for 3000 rpm. The features in each failure mode were processed sequentially from the 1st to 150th signal as a data stream from a CM system.
In order to present different types of faults, in this subsection only outcome of mode 2, 3, 4 and 6 analysis for one shaft velocity will be discussed (see
Section 3.1). The results are presented in
Figure 8 and
Figure 9.
The four subfigures in each figure (a,b and d,e) reveal sequence of novelty prediction (novelty) and novelty reference (novelty reference) in comparison to the failure development functions (FDFs). In the juxtaposition of the novelty waveforms from these figures, the deviation of models from most samples in the immediate vicinity is present. When such fluctuations occur for an undamaged machine, it indicates false alarms, which generate additional costs.
The rest subfigures in each figure (c,f) contain confusion matrix values in form of bar graphs. All points are divided into 4 groups: True Negatives (TN), False Negatives (FN), True Positives (TP), and False Positives (FP). The values representing the efficiency and false positives percentages for each of the modes are presented in
Table 4.
The novelty reference was obtained from FDFs. For FDFs values corresponding to the normal state, the novelty reference is equal 0. For values significantly different from the normal range, the novelty reference is set to 1. For signals in between, the function takes the value 0.5 and, it is not accounted for confusion matrix results. The novelty reference was unknown for the ND algorithms.
The discussion will begin from Mode 2-Imbalance. The results of sequence novelty evaluation are presented in
Figure 8a–c. Considering the false positives criterion, the NN and Ensemble would cause the least number of false alarms. Regarding the total efficiency, the best performance in detecting imbalance was obtained by OLINDDA.
Another of the analyzed failures is mode 3-Gearbox, which simulated the generalized gear failure. The waveforms showing the development of damage for 3000 rpm are presented in
Figure 8d,e. Considering ND indication fluctuations for the normal state, all presented models reveal similar behavior. Based on
Figure 8f, it is impossible to determine which one was the best in terms of the smallest number of false-positive (FP) classifications.
The last type of analyzed failure concerns rolling elements bearings (REB), simulated in mode 4. The waveforms containing the development of damage for 3000 rpm are presented in
Figure 9a,b, and the collective results are presented in
Figure 9c. Consideration of the number of false alarms exposes a similar prediction rate for all presented models visible in
Figure 9a,b. The exception is NN, which manifests in the smallest number of false positives (FPs). The highest ratio of false negatives (FNs) reveals OLINDDA in
Figure 9c. Other models also reveal some difficulties with REB failure detection, but comparing to OLINDDA are better. In this statement, the UDDB manifests the highest rate of correct classification.
An explanation of the NN and UBBD improvement is related to the last waveform in
Figure 6. The rolling bearing failure occurrence is manifested in the increase of the spectrum RMS indicator. Referring to the algorithm’s feature space, the distance to the samples related to the damage state is distinguishable even for a slowly developing fault. Such behavior allows for proper classification by distance-based algorithms such as NN. The mentioned above damage aspect favors the UDDB algorithm, which assesses states based on one dimension threshold.
The important observation concerning all models is their high sensitivity for detecting this type of damage. Compared to gearbox failure (
Figure 8f) or imbalance (
Figure 8c), the improvement in performance is significant.
The last results presented in
Figure 9e,f show the occurrence of all failures simultaneously. The efficiency of the models achieved in this scenario is the highest one. Here, the model’s efficiency is derived from detecting the failure to which the model is most sensitive. In the case of UDDB and NN, such failure is an inner race fault. The OLINDDA and Ensemble algorithms achieved the highest performance rate when compared to results obtained for each failure separately. The combination of failures activates these algorithms to achieve better performance.
An important aspect regarding the implementation of the algorithms is their computational complexity.
Table 5 shows the average model execution time. The shortest execution time is achieved by the UDDB model, while the longest by OLINDDA. The explanation is related to updating the model with new clusters, which takes time but improves the efficiency of structure assessment. Considering both the computation time and efficiency, NN proves one of the highest accuracies with fast execution.