Semi-supervised Cavitation Detection for Centrifugal Pumps

Abstract

Cavitation is a dominant failure mode that accelerates the wear and deterioration of pumps. Cavitation can lead to pump malfunction and, eventually, catastrophic failure of the whole system. Therefore, it is important to avoid cavitation in the pump. This paper proposes a semi-supervised learning method that detects cavitation in centrifugal pumps. One-dimensional (1D) vibration signals are converted into two-dimensional (2D) images by the short time Fourier transform. The severity of the cavitation is determined using the variational autoencoder and Mahalanobis distance. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated using the data collected from a 0.75 kW hydraulic pump testbed. It is confirmed that the proposed method can detect cavitation with different severities and help avoid the cavitation phenomenon. © 2022 Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers. All rights reserved.