A Feature Selection Committee Method Using Empirical Mode Decomposition for Multiple Fault Classification in a Wind Turbine Gearbox

Gearboxes are widely used in various industries such as aircrafts, automobiles, wind turbines, ship industries among others. Due its complex configuration, it is a challenging task to identify fault and failures patterns. Its internal components, such as bearings and gears, have different fault patterns, that can appear in one or in both components. The vibration signals were processed using the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) and the Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) to select the significant Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) and then 18 features were extract from this IMFs. Four features ranking techniques [ReliefF, Chi-Square, Max Relevance Min Redundancy (mRMR) and Decision Tree] were used in a committee to select the best feature set, among the 10 with the highest rank, that appears at least in 3 of the 4 methods. The new feature set was used as an input to Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest (RF) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) algorithms. The results showed that the use of the PCC value as a tool for selecting the significant IMFs, combined with the feature committee led to good results for this classification problem. In this case study, the ANN model outperformed the SVM and the RF algorithms, by using only 4 features to achieve 95.42% of accuracy and 6 features to achieve 100% of accuracy.