Fault detection in water pumps based on sound analysis using a deep learning technique

Abstract

Machine fault detection is designed to automatically detect faults or damage in machines. When a machine operates, it produces vibrations and sound signals that can be analyzed to provide information about the status of the machine. This study proposed a method to detect the faults in a machine based on sound analysis using a deep learning technique. The sound signals generated by the machine were obtained and analyzed under different operating conditions. These signals were first pre-processed to eliminate noise, and then the features were extracted as mel-spectrograms so that the convolutional neural network could automatically learn the appropriate features required for classification. Experiments were conducted on three different water pumps during suction from and discharge to the water tank under normal and abnormal operating conditions. The high accuracies in fault detections in both known and unknown machines indicated that the proposed model performed very well in the detection of machine faults.