Data-driven Detection and Diagnosis of Incipient Faults in Electrical Drives of High-Speed Trains

Abstract

Incipient faults in electrical drives can corrupt overall performance of high-speed trains; however, they are difficult to discover because of their slight fault symptoms. By sufficiently exploiting the distribution information of incipient faults, this paper presents the reason why incipient faults cannot be detected by the existing fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) methods. Under principal component analysis (PCA) framework, we propose a new data-driven FDD method, which is named probability-relevant PCA (PRPCA), for electrical drives in high-speed trains. The salient strengths of the PRPCA-based FDD method are: 1) it can greatly improve the fault detectability; it is suitable for non-Gaussian electrical drives; 2) based on the improved fault detectability, it can achieve accurate fault diagnosis via support vector machine; and 3) it can be easily applied to electrical drives even if neither physical models or parameters nor expert knowledge of drive systems is given; and it is of highly computational efficiency that can meet requirements on the real-time FDD. A set of experiments on a dSPACE platform-based traction system of the CRH2A-type high-speed train are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.