Performance Degradation Assessment Method for Cracked Rotor Based on Multi-observation Hidden Markov Model

Reliability of rotating machinery has a significant relation with personal safety and economic efficiency. With the development of science and technology, the improvement of performance degradation of machinery becomes increasingly higher. Research of traditional reliability theory depends on failure data. Some lifetime data result in little or even no failure. For mechanical equipment, degradation data may contain useful information about machinery reliability. Service condition of rotating machinery suffers from a long period of deterioration time until functional failure occurs. However, normal or failure status of rotating machinery is simply defined by traditional fault diagnosis methods. A machinery performance degradation assessment method for the cracked rotor based on multi-observation Hidden Markov Model is proposed for rotating machinery in run-up and shutdown processes. The proposed method can reflect the change of the performance of rotating machinery effectively. Finally, dynamics simulation data of the cracked rotor with gradually decreasing stiffness is used to validate the feasibility of the proposed method. Copyright © 2014 IFSA Publishing, S. L.