Early stage white etching crack identification using artificial neural networks

White Etching Cracks (WEC) in gearbox bearings is a major concern in the wind turbine industry, which can lead to a premature failure of the gearbox. Though many hypotheses regarding the generation of WEC have been proposed over the decades, the answer is still disputable. To trace back the failures to earlier stages before they occur, an innovative sensor-set has been utilized on a test rig to monitor the influencing factors that lead to WEC. This paperwork seeks to recognize abnormal patterns from recorded sensor data and derive statements of sensible sensor combinations in WEC early detection. A Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) network-based autoencoder is proposed for the anomaly detection (AD) task. Employing an auto-associative sequence-to-sequence predictor, a model is trained to reconstruct the normal time series data without WEC. The reconstruction error of testing time series data is evaluated for the determination of its anomaly. The results show that the specified LSTM autoencoder framework can qualitatively distinguish anomalies from collected multivariate time series data. Moreover, the anomaly score evaluated via reconstruction-error-based metrics can discriminate normal and abnormal behaviors in the study. This investigation’s results entail a significant step towards early WEC risk detection and more cost-efficient wind turbine technology if this approach can be further applied on stream data with plausible thresholds in monitoring system.