Classifier-Free Diffusion-Based Weakly-Supervised Approach for Health Indicator Derivation in Rotating Machines: Advancing Early Fault Detection and Condition Monitoring

Deriving health indicators of rotating machines is crucial for their maintenance. However, this process is challenging for the prevalent adopted intelligent methods since they may take the whole data distributions, not only introducing noise interference but also lacking the explainability. To address these issues, we propose a diffusion-based weakly-supervised approach for deriving health indicators of rotating machines, enabling early fault detection and continuous monitoring of condition evolution. This approach relies on a classifier-free diffusion model trained using healthy samples and a few anomalies. This model generates healthy samples. and by comparing the differences between the original samples and the generated ones in the envelope spectrum, we construct an anomaly map that clearly identifies faults. Health indicators are then derived, which can explain the fault types and mitigate noise interference. Comparative studies on two cases demonstrate that the proposed method offers superior health monitoring effectiveness and robustness compared to baseline models.

Uncertainty-Guided Alignment for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Regression

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Regression (UDAR) aims to adapt a model from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain for regression tasks. Recent successful works in UDAR mostly focus on subspace alignment, involving the alignment of a selected subspace within the entire feature space. This contrasts with the feature alignment methods used for classification, which aim at aligning the entire feature space and have proven effective but are less so in regression settings. Specifically, while classification aims to identify separate clusters across the entire embedding dimension, regression induces less structure in the data representation, necessitating additional guidance for efficient alignment. In this paper, we propose an effective method for UDAR by incorporating guidance from uncertainty. Our approach serves a dual purpose: providing a measure of confidence in predictions and acting as a regularization of the embedding space. Specifically, we leverage the Deep Evidential Learning framework, which outputs both predictions and uncertainties for each input sample. We propose aligning the parameters of higher-order evidential distributions between the source and target domains using traditional alignment methods at the feature or posterior level. Additionally, we propose to augment the feature space representation by mixing source samples with pseudo-labeled target samples based on label similarity. This cross-domain mixing strategy produces more realistic samples than random mixing and introduces higher uncertainty, facilitating further alignment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on four benchmarks for UDAR, on which we outperform existing methods.

A Comparison of Residual-based Methods on Fault Detection

An important initial step in fault detection for complex industrial systems is gaining an understanding of their health condition. Subsequently, continuous monitoring of this health condition becomes crucial to observe its evolution, track changes over time, and isolate faults. As faults are typically rare occurrences, it is essential to perform this monitoring in an unsupervised manner. Various approaches have been proposed not only to detect faults in an unsupervised manner but also to distinguish between different potential fault types. In this study, we perform a comprehensive comparison between two residual-based approaches: autoencoders, and the input-output models that establish a mapping between operating conditions and sensor readings. We explore the sensor-wise residuals and aggregated residuals for the entire system in both methods. The performance evaluation focuses on three tasks: health indicator construction, fault detection, and health indicator interpretation. To perform the comparison, we utilize the Commercial Modular Aero-Propulsion System Simulation (C-MAPSS) dynamical model, specifically a subset of the turbofan engine dataset containing three different fault types. All models are trained exclusively on healthy data. Fault detection is achieved by applying a threshold that is determined based on the healthy condition. The detection results reveal that both models are capable of detecting faults with an average delay of around 20 cycles and maintain a low false positive rate. While the fault detection performance is similar for both models, the input-output model provides better interpretability regarding potential fault types and the possible faulty components.

Vacuum Circuit Breaker Closing Time Key Moments Detection via Vibration Monitoring: A Run-to-Failure Study

Circuit breakers (CBs) play an important role in modern society because they make the power transmission and distribution systems reliable and resilient. Therefore, it is important to maintain their reliability and to monitor their operation. A key to ensure a reliable operation of CBs is to monitor their condition. In this work, we performed an accelerated life testing for mechanical failures of a vacuum circuit breaker (VCB) by performing close-open operations continuously until failure. We recorded data for each operation and made the collected run-to-failure dataset publicly available. In our experiments, the VCB operated more than 26000 close-open operations without current load with the time span of five months. The run-to-failure long-term monitoring enables us to monitor the evolution of the VCB condition and the degradation over time. To monitor CB condition, closing time is one of the indicators, which is usually measured when the CB is taken out of operation and is completely disconnected from the network. We propose an algorithm that enables to infer the same information on the closing time from a non-intrusive sensor. By utilizing the short-time energy (STE) of the vibration signal, it is possible to identify the key moments when specific events happen including the time when the latch starts to move, and the closing time. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on the VCB dataset and is also compared to the binary segmentation (BS) change point detection algorithm. This research highlights the potential for continuous online condition monitoring, which is the basis for applying future predictive maintenance strategies.

Robust Time Series Denoising with Learnable Wavelet Packet Transform

In many applications, signal denoising is often the first pre-processing step before any subsequent analysis or learning task. In this paper, we propose to apply a deep learning denoising model inspired by a signal processing, a learnable version of wavelet packet transform. The proposed algorithm has signficant learning capabilities with few interpretable parameters and has an intuitive initialisation. We propose a post-learning modification of the parameters to adapt the denoising to different noise levels. We evaluate the performance of the proposed methodology on two case studies and compare it to other state of the art approaches, including wavelet schrinkage denoising, convolutional neural network, autoencoder and U-net deep models. The first case study is based on designed functions that have typically been used to study denoising properties of the algorithms. The second case study is an audio background removal task. We demonstrate how the proposed algorithm relates to the universality of signal processing methods and the learning capabilities of deep learning approaches. In particular, we evaluate the obtained denoising performances on structured noisy signals inside and outside the classes used for training. In addition to having good performance in denoising signals inside and outside to the training class, our method shows to be particularly robust when different noise levels, noise types and artifacts are added.