Tuan-Khai Nguyen

Reliable condition monitoring of milling machines (MMs) is essential for maintaining quality of the output product and avoiding downtime, but traditional acoustic emission (AE)-based approaches using features such as root mean square (RMS), kurtosis, or band-limited energies either blur burst events with background activity or rely on ad hoc thresholding of AE hits. As a result, rotation-synchronous AE bursts generated by tool wear, bearing damage, and gear defects are incompletely captured and difficult to exploit for robust multi-fault diagnosis. This article presents Katz fractal dimension AE event scanner (KFD-AEEScan), a single-sensor diagnostic framework that processes AE signals into time-scale maps of local fractal complexity, replacing purely amplitude- or energy-based traces with a multiscale representation more sensitive to transient burst activity. A sliding-window Katz fractal-dimension estimator is applied at multiple window lengths, producing KFD traces in which burst-dominated regions gravitate toward the lower bound of KFD, while quasi-stationary background occupies higher-complexity levels. These traces are synchronized and stacked into compact two-dimensional time-scale maps, in which multiple KFD scales jointly encode the prominence and timing of AE bursts along each cutting pass. The framework is validated on real milling-machine AE data under multiple spindle speeds and four health states: normal, cutting tool wear, spindle bearing fault, and gearbox fault. KFD-AEEScan achieves high, well-balanced macro-F1 across all classes and outperforms representative wavelet-fractal, short-time Fourier transform-based, and Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD)-fractal baselines. The results indicate that localized KFD mapping of AE bursts provides an effective representation for multi-fault diagnosis and predictive maintenance in MMs.

Pressurized fluid pipelines are among the most crucial components in industrial settings. Operating under high pressure leads to pipeline susceptibility to cracking, rupture, and significant damage. Monitoring the condition and predicting the remaining useful life before the failure of pressurized pipes are essential for informed and timely maintenance decisions. In this work, we propose a novel method for predicting the remaining useful life of pressurized pipelines based on acoustic emission monitoring and similarity-based learning. Specifically, acoustic emission sensors are deployed to record acoustic emission events caused by cracks in the pipeline. A pipeline health indicator is proposed based on accumulated events detected through a constant false alarm rate signal detector. Leveraging the historical run-to-fail trajectories of the health indicator, a similarity measure is introduced to predict the remaining pipeline life. This method computes the similarity between the current health indicator trajectory and past trajectories based on a Euclidean distance in the proposed derivative convolutional domain. Trajectory similarity determines the remaining lifetime similarity, which is weighted using data-adaptive fuzzy rules to estimate the current remaining useful life. Elaborate experimental validations are conducted on a custom pressurized pipeline system in a laboratory setting. Experimental results demonstrate the high efficacy of the proposed method in predicting the remaining useful life of the pipeline, surpassing other commonly used methods in both accuracy and certainty.

This paper proposes a novel and reliable leak-detection method for pipeline systems based on acoustic emission (AE) signals. The proposed method analyzes signals from two AE sensors installed on the pipeline to detect leaks located between these two sensors. Firstly, the raw AE signals are preprocessed using empirical mode decomposition. The time difference of arrival (TDOA) is then extracted as a statistical feature of the two AE signals. The state of the pipeline (leakage/normal) is determined through comparing the statistical distribution of the TDOA of the current state with the prior normal state. Specifically, the two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov (K–S) test is applied to compare the statistical distribution of the TDOA feature for leak and non-leak scenarios. The K–S test statistic value in this context functions as a leakage indicator. A new criterion called leak sensitivity is introduced to evaluate and compare the performance of leak detection methods. Extensive experiments were conducted using an industrial pipeline system, and the results demonstrate the excellence of the proposed method in leak detection. Compared to traditional feature-based indicators, our approach achieves a significantly higher performance in leak detection.

In this paper, an approach to perform leak state detection and size identification for industrial fluid pipelines with an acoustic emission (AE) activity intensity index curve (AIIC), using b-value and a random forest (RF), is proposed. Initially, the b-value was calculated from pre-processed AE data, which was then utilized to construct AIICs. The AIIC presents a robust description of AE intensity, especially for detecting the leaking state, even with the complication of the multi-source problem of AE events (AEEs), in which there are other sources, rather than just leaking, contributing to the AE activity. In addition, it shows the capability to not just discriminate between normal and leaking states, but also to distinguish different leak sizes. To calculate the probability of a state change from normal condition to leakage, a changepoint detection method, using a Bayesian ensemble, was utilized. After the leak is detected, size identification is performed by feeding the AIIC to the RF. The experimental results were compared with two cutting-edge methods under different scenarios with various pressure levels and leak sizes, and the proposed method outperformed both the earlier algorithms in terms of accuracy.

In this study, a scheme for leak localization on a cylinder tank bottom using acoustic emission (AE) is proposed. This approach provides a means of early failure detection, thus reducing financial damage and hazards to the environment and users. The scheme starts with the hit detection process using a constant false alarm rate (CFAR) and a fixed thresholding method for a time of arrival (TOA) and an end-time determination. The detected hits are then investigated to group those originating from the same AE source together by enforcing an event definition and a similarity score. Afterwards, these newly grouped hits are processed by a time difference of arrival (TDOA) to find the locations of the events. Since the locations of the events alone do not pinpoint the leak location, a data density analysis using a Voronoi diagram is employed to find the area with the highest possibility of a leak’s existence. The proposed method was validated using the Hsu-Nielsen test on a cylinder tank bottom under a one-failed-sensor scenario, which returned a highly accurate result across multiple test locations.

This paper proposes a new technique for the construction of a concrete-beam health indicator based on the Kullback–Leibler divergence (KLD) and deep learning. Health indicator (HI) construction is a vital part of remaining useful lifetime (RUL) approaches for monitoring the health of concrete structures. Through the construction of a HI, the deterioration process can be processed and portrayed so that it can be forwarded to a prediction module for RUL prognosis. The degradation progression and failure can be identified by predicting the RUL based on the situation of the current specimen; as a result, maintenance can be planned to reduce safety risks, reduce financial costs, and prolong the specimen’s useful lifetime. The portrayal of deterioration through HI construction from raw acoustic emission (AE) data is performed using a deep neural network (DNN), whose parameters are obtained by pretraining and fine tuning using a stack autoencoder (SAE). Kullback–Leibler divergence, which is calculated between a reference normal-conditioned signal and a current unknown signal, was used to represent the deterioration process of concrete structures, which has not been investigated for the concrete beams so far. The DNN-based constructor then learns to generate HI from raw data with KLD values as the training label. The HI construction result was evaluated with run-to-fail test data of concrete specimens with two measurements: fitness analysis of the construction result and RUL prognosis. The results confirm the reliability of KLD in portraying the deterioration process, showing a large improvement in comparison to other methods. In addition, this method requires no adept knowledge of the nature of the AE or the system fault, which is more favorable than model-based approaches where this level of expertise is compulsory. Furthermore, AE offers in-service monitoring, allowing the RUL prognosis task to be performed without disrupting the specimen’s work.

This study proposes a fault diagnosis method (FD) for multistage centrifugal pumps (MCP) using informative ratio principal component analysis (Ir-PCA). To overcome the interference and background noise in the vibration signatures (VS) of the centrifugal pump, the fault diagnosis method selects the fault-specific frequency band (FSFB) in the first step. Statistical features in time, frequency, and wavelet domains were extracted from the fault-specific frequency band. In the second step, all of the extracted features were combined into a single feature vector called a multi-domain feature pool (MDFP). The multi-domain feature pool results in a larger dimension; furthermore, not all of the features are best for representing the centrifugal pump condition and can affect the condition classification accuracy of the classifier. To obtain discriminant features with low dimensions, this paper introduces a novel informative ratio principal component analysis in the third step. The technique first assesses the feature informativeness towards the fault by calculating the informative ratio between the feature within the class scatteredness and between-class distance. To obtain a discriminant set of features with reduced dimensions, principal component analysis was applied to the features with a high informative ratio. The combination of informative ratio-based feature assessment and principal component analysis forms the novel informative ratio principal component analysis. The new set of discriminant features obtained from the novel technique are then provided to the K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) condition classifier for multistage centrifugal pump condition classification. The proposed method outperformed existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of fault classification accuracy.

In this study, a scheme of remaining useful lifetime (RUL) prognosis from raw acoustic emission (AE) data is presented to predict the concrete structure’s failure before its occurrence, thus possibly prolong its service life and minimizing the risk of accidental damage. The deterioration process is portrayed by the health indicator (HI), which is automatically constructed from raw AE data with a deep neural network pretrained and fine-tuned by a stacked autoencoder deep neural network (SAE-DNN). For the deep neural network structure to perform a more accurate construction of health indicator lines, a hit removal process with a one-class support vector machine (OC-SVM), which has not been investigated in previous studies, is proposed to extract only the hits which matter the most to the portrait of deterioration. The new set of hits is then harnessed as the training labels for the deep neural network. After the completion of the health indicator line construction, health indicators are forwarded to a long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM-RNN) for the training and validation of the remaining useful life prediction, as this structure is capable of capturing the long-term dependencies, even with a limited set of data. Our prediction result shows a significant improvement in comparison with a similar scheme but without the hit removal process and other methods, such as the gated recurrent unit recurrent neural network (GRU-RNN) and the simple recurrent neural network.

Remaining useful life (RUL) prognosis is one of the most important techniques in concrete structure health management. This technique evaluates the concrete structure strength through determining the advent of failure, which is very helpful to reduce maintenance costs and extend structure life. Degradation information with the capability of reflecting structure health can be considered as a principal factor to achieve better prognosis performance. In traditional data-driven RUL prognosis, there are drawbacks in which features are manually extracted and threshold is defined to mark the specimen’s breakdown. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents an innovative SAE-DNN structure capable of automatic health indicator (HI) construction from raw signals. HI curves constructed by SAE-DNN have much better fitness metrics than HI curves constructed from statistical parameters such as RMS, Kurtosis, Sknewness, etc. In the next stage, HI curves constructed from training degradation data are then used to train a long short-term memory recurrent neural network (LSTM-RNN). The LSTM-RNN is utilized as a RUL predictor since its special gates allow it to learn long-term dependencies even when the training data is limited. Model construction, verification, and comparison are performed on experimental reinforced concrete (RC) beam data. Experimental results indicates that LSTM-RNN generally estimates more accurate RULs of concrete beams than GRU-RNN and simple RNN with the average prediction error cycles was less than half compared to those of the simple RNN.