A Cost-Efficient MFCC-Based Fault Detection and Isolation Technology for Electromagnetic Pumps

Fluid pumps serve critical purposes in hydraulic systems so their failure affects productivity, profitability, safety, etc. The need for proper condition monitoring and health assessment of these pumps cannot be overemphasized and this has resulted in extensive research studies on standard techniques for ensuring optimum fault detection and isolation (FDI) results for these pumps. Interestingly, mechanical vibrational signals reflect operating conditions and by exploring the robust time–frequency-domain feature extraction techniques, the underlying nonlinear characteristics can be captured for reliable fault diagnosis/condition assessment. This study is based on the use of vibrational signals for fault isolation of electromagnetic pumps. From the vibrational signals, Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), the first-order and the second-order differentials were extracted and the salient features selected by a rank-based recursive feature elimination (RFE) of uncorrelated features. The proposed framework was tested and validated on five VSC63A5 electromagnetic pumps at various fault conditions and isolated/classified using the Gaussian kernel SVM (SVM-RBF-RFE). Results show that the proposed feature selection approach is computationally cheaper and significantly improves diagnostics performance. In addition, the proposed framework yields a comparatively better diagnostics results on electromagnetic pumps in comparison with other diagnostics methods, hence a more reliable diagnostics tool for electromagnetic pumps.