Study on cavitation fault features of centrifugal pumps based on principal component analysis

Abstract

Abstract The centrifugal pump plays a key role in the ship water supply system, and cavitation is a common fault mode that leads to poor efficiency of centrifugal pumps. To select valid features as the criteria of cavitation fault diagnosis, we calculate RMS, peak factor, kurtosis factor, wave factor of raw data, and the data after empirical mode decomposition (EMD). Although the raw features can be obtained, they were still in a high-dimensional space and contain a lot of redundant information. So, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) method was used to decrease dimensions and extract sensitive features. As a case study, the data were obtained from a centrifugal pump fault simulation bench, and a variety of cavitation states were observed in the experiment. And a six-dimensional sensitive feature vector was determined through data analysis.