Statistical Incipient Fault Detection and Diagnosis with Kullback-Leibler Divergence : from Theory to Applications

摘要

This phD dissertation deals with the detection and diagnosis of incipient faults in engineering and industrial systems by non-parametric statistical approaches. An incipient fault is supposed to provoke an abnormal change in the measurements of the system variables. However, this change is imperceptible and also unpredictable due to the large signal-to-fault ratio and the low fault-to-noise ratio characterizing the incipient fault. The detection and identification of a global change require a ’global’ approach that takes into account the total faults signature. In this context, the Kullback-Leibler divergence is considered to be a ’global’ fault indicator, which is recommended sensitive to abnormal small variations hidden in noise. A ’global’ spectral analysis approach is also proposed for the diagnosis of faults with a frequency signature. The ’global’ statistical approach is proved on two application studies. The first one concerns the detection and characterization of minor cracks in conductive structures. The second application concerns the diagnosis of bearing faults in electrical rotating machines. In addition, the fault estimation problem is addressed in this work. A theoretical study is conducted to obtain an analytical model of the KL divergence, from which an estimate of the amplitude of the incipient fault is derived.