Fault detection of a reciprocating plunger pump with fault-free data based on an unsupervised feature encoder and minimum covariance determinant

Abstract

Abstract It is well known that complex mechanical equipment has many differnt the failure modes, and monitoring data for fault conditions are scarce. Therefore, research on fault detection for reciprocating plunger pumps with fault-free data is significant for theory and application. Due to the lack of prior knowledge of faults, it is always a great challenge for researchers to extract fault features from signals. In this paper, an innovative fault detection method for a reciprocating plunger pump is proposed based on an unsupervised feature encoder (UFE) and minimum covariance determination (MCD). Firstly, a criterion based on mutual information maximization for local and global features is proposed for unsupervised feature extraction. In addition, an unsupervised training strategy based on negative sampling is proposed to train the encoder, so that the model can converge quickly and improve the stability of model training. A fault detection algorithm for a reciprocating plunger pump is proposed based on a UFE and MCD. Finally, the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method are verified with the measured data for a reciprocating plunger pump. The results show that the proposed method can accurately detect the faults in the reciprocating plunger pump with a detection accuracy of more than 98%. Compared with other methods, the proposed fault detection algorithm has better applicability and accuracy for fault detection with fault-free data.