Bayesian stochastic neural network model for turbomachinery damage prediction

Abstract

Turbomachinery often suffers various defects such as impeller cracking, resulting in forced outage, increased maintenance costs, and reduced productivity. Condition monitoring and damage prognostics has been widely used as an increasingly important and powerful tool to improve the system availability, reliability, performance, and maintainability, but still very challenging due to multiple sources of data uncertainties and the complexity of analytics modeling. This paper presents an intelligent probabilistic methodology for anomaly prediction of high-fidelity turbomachine, considering multiple data imperfections and multivariate correlation. The proposed method adeptly integrates several advanced state-of-the-art signal processing and artificial intelligence techniques: wavelet multiresolution decomposition, Bayesian hypothesis testing, probabilistic principal component analysis, and fuzzy stochastic neural network modeling. The advanced signal processing is employed to reduce dimensionality and to address multivariate correlation and data uncertainty for damage prediction. Instead of conventionally using raw time series data, principal components are utilized in the establishment of stochastic neural network model and anomaly prediction. Bayesian interval hypothesis testing metric is then presented to quantitatively compare the predicted and measured data for model validation and anomaly evaluation, thus providing a confidence indicator to judge the model quality and evaluate the equipment status. Bayesian method is developed in this study for denoising the raw data with multiresolution wavelet decomposition, quantifying the model accuracy, and assessing the equipment status. The dynamic stochastic neural network model is established via the nonlinear autoregressive moving average with exogenous inputs approach. It seamlessly integrates the fuzzy clustering and independent Bernoulli random function into radial basis function neural network. A natural gradient method based on Kullback-Leibler distance criterion is employed to maximize the log-likelihood loss function. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology and procedure is demonstrated with the 11-variable time series data and the forced outage event of a real-world centrifugal compressor.