Fault feature extraction for planetary bearing of CRF pump in nuclear power plant based on TFDC-QPSO-optimised MOMEDA

Abstract

Abstract To address the issue of weak fault features and difficulty in feature extraction for planetary gearbox bearings of the circulation water pump (CRF pump) unit in the conventional island of a nuclear power plant, a deconvolution method, named the multipoint optimal minimum entropy deconvolution adjusted (MOMEDA), is optimised by a mixing operator improved quantum behaviour particle swarm optimisation (QPSO) algorithm, to extract the periodic fault impulse of planetary gearbox bearings. In the mixing operator, a differential evolution operator is introduced to improve particle swarms’ diversity and enhance the algorithm’s global optimisation capability. Meanwhile, a proposed adaptive CrossOver operator is incorporated into the algorithm to increase its convergence speed. Then, combining these two types of operators can construct a parameter optimisation algorithm displaying both global optimisation capability and high algorithm execution efficiency. Consider capturing the periodic impulsive features relating to bearing faults. A fitness function based on the characteristic information of the deconvolution signal in the time and frequency domain is proposed. This function serves as the objective function to facilitate the parameter optimisation on MOMEDA. Thereby, it enhances the optimisation capability of our feature extraction method. Experiments were conducted by adopting the proposed method on the signals collected from the inner- and outer-race faulty planetary bearing in a test bed, in which favourable feature extraction results are obtained. After the comparative analysis, we observed that both significances of features extracted by this method and the execution efficiency of the algorithm are superior compared to other methods. The on-site feature extraction results of the input shaft bearing in the planetary gearbox of a CRF pump unit in a nuclear power plant also demonstrated the engineering practicability of the method proposed in this work.