Fault diagnosis for rotor based on multi-sensor information and progressive strategies

Abstract Fault diagnosis is an effective tool to ensure safe operation of machinery and avoid serious accidents. As most currently used fault diagnosis methods usually employ mapping relationship established by training samples and their labels to achieve classification of testing samples, it is difficult for them to achieve fault diagnosis under the condition of incomplete training sample types. In addition, previous studies usually focus on feature extraction of single-channel vibration signal, which cannot get complete fault feature information. To solve the above problems, a progressive fault diagnosis method is investigated in this paper. First, the preliminary fault detection for the rotor is performed by studying reconstruction error of a sparse auto-encoder. Second, if a fault exists in the rotor, the outlier detection is implemented by the support vector data description method. Finally, if there are no outlier samples, the well -trained support vector machine is used to confirm the type of fault samples and complete the diagnosis. The performance of the proposed method was verified using the data obtained from a rotor laboratory bench. The types of rotor states investigated include normal, contact-rubbing, unbalance and misalignment. The experimental results verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in reducing the incidents of fault omission and fault misunderstanding.