Fault Diagnosis Method based on Feature Residual Values for Industrial Rotor Machines

Downtime and malfunction of industrial rotor machines represents a crucial cost burden and productivity loss. Fault diagnosis of this equipment has recently been carried out to detect their fault(s) and cause(s) by using fault classification methods. However, these methods are of limited use in detecting rotor faults because of their hypersensitivity to unexpected and different equipment conditions individually. These limitations tend to affect the accuracy of fault classification since fault-related features calculated from vibration signal are moved to other regions or changed. To improve the limited diagnosis accuracy of existing methods, we propose a new approach for fault diagnosis of rotor machines based on the model generated by supervised learning. Our work is based on feature residual values from vibration signals as fault indices. Our diagnostic model is a robust and flexible process that, once learned from historical data only one time, allows it to apply to different target systems without optimization of algorithms. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated by comparing its results with conventional methods for fault diagnosis of rotor machines. The experimental results show that the proposed method can be used to achieve better fault diagnosis, even when applied to systems with different normal-state signals, scales, and structures, without tuning or the use of a complementary algorithm. The effectiveness of the method was assessed by simulation using various rotor machine models.