Dong Wang

Bio: Dong Wang is an academic researcher from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The author has contributed to research in topics: Bearing (mechanical) & Computer science. The author has an hindex of 35, co-authored 144 publications receiving 3945 citations. Previous affiliations of Dong Wang include Sichuan University & City University of Hong Kong.

Prognostics and Health Management: A Review of Vibration Based Bearing and Gear Health Indicators

Abstract: Prognostics and health management is an emerging discipline to scientifically manage the health condition of engineering systems and their critical components. It mainly consists of three main aspects: construction of health indicators, remaining useful life prediction, and health management. Construction of health indicators aims to evaluate the system’s current health condition and its critical components. Given the observations of a health indicator, prediction of the remaining useful life is used to infer the time when an engineering systems or a critical component will no longer perform its intended function. Health management involves planning the optimal maintenance schedule according to the system’s current and future health condition, its critical components and the replacement costs. Construction of health indicators is the key to predicting the remaining useful life. Bearings and gears are the most common mechanical components in rotating machines, and their health conditions are of great concern in practice. Because it is difficult to measure and quantify the health conditions of bearings and gears in many cases, numerous vibration-based methods have been proposed to construct bearing and gear health indicators. This paper presents a thorough review of vibration-based bearing and gear health indicators constructed from mechanical signal processing, modeling, and machine learning. This review paper will be helpful for designing further advanced bearing and gear health indicators and provides a basis for predicting the remaining useful life of bearings and gears. Most of the bearing and gear health indicators reviewed in this paper are highly relevant to simulated and experimental run-to-failure data rather than artificially seeded bearing and gear fault data. Finally, some problems in the literature are highlighted and areas for future study are identified.

Machine learning

Abstract: Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).