Early Identification of Machine Fault Based on Kernel Principal Components Analysis

Principal Components Analysis (PCA) is used to classify the running condition of a machine by means of projecting the original data to the Principal Components space. However, if the data are concentrated in a nonlinear subspace, PCA will fail to work well. Kernel Principal Components Analysis (KPCA) transforms the input data from the original input space into a higher dimensional feature space with the nonlinear mapping, and then uses the nonlinear principal components to realize the classification. In this paper a case of gear fault diagnosis was studied with KPCA. The characteristic values of frequent domain from vibration signals of the gearbox under the running condition were extracted, and the KPCA method was used to classify gear crack fault. The result shows that KPCA is more effective to distinguish the state of the gear and more suitable to diagnose the gear faults in early stage.