Crack classification in rotor-bearing system by means of wavelet transform and deep learning methods: an experimental investigation

Abstract

Parallel with significant growth in industry, especially mysteries related to energy engineering, condition monitoring of rotating systems have been experiencing a noticeable increase. One of the prevalent faults in these systems is fatigue crack, so finding reliable procedures in identification of cracks in rotating shafts has become a pressing problem among engineers during recent decades. While a vast majority of cracked rotors can operate for a specific period of time, to prevent catastrophic failures, crack detection and measuring its characteristics (i.e. size and its location) seem to be essential. In the present essay, a hybrid procedure, consisting of Deep Learning and Discrete Wavelet transform (DWT), is applied in detection of a breathing transverse crack and its depth in a rotor-bearing-disk system. DWT with Daubechies 32(db32) as wavelet mother function is applied in signal noise reduction until level 6, also its Relative Wavelet Energy (RWE) and Wavelet entropy (WE) are extracted. A characteristic vector that is a combination of RWE and WE is considered as input to a multi-layer Artificial Neural Network (ANN). In this supervised learning classifier, a multi-layer Perceptron neural network is used; in addition, Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) function is exerted as activation function in both hidden and output layers. By comparing the results, it can be seen that the applied procedure has strong capacity in identification of crack and its size in the rotor system.