Mechanical Engineering

Parallel with significant growth in industry, especially mysteries related to energy engineering, condition monitoring of rotating systems have been experiencing a noticeable increase. One of the prevalent faults in these systems is fatigue crack, so finding reliable procedures in identification of cracks in rotating shafts has become a pressing problem among engineers during recent decades. While a vast majority of cracked rotors can operate for a specific period of time, to prevent catastrophic failures, crack detection and measuring its characteristics (i.e. size and its location) seem to be essential. In the present essay, a hybrid procedure, consisting of Deep Learning and Discrete Wavelet transform (DWT), is applied in detection of a breathing transverse crack and its depth in a rotor-bearing-disk system. DWT with Daubechies 32(db32) as wavelet mother function is applied in signal noise reduction until level 6, also its Relative Wavelet Energy (RWE) and Wavelet entropy (WE) are extracted. A characteristic vector that is a combination of RWE and WE is considered as input to a multi-layer Artificial Neural Network (ANN). In this supervised learning classifier, a multi-layer Perceptron neural network is used; in addition, Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) function is exerted as activation function in both hidden and output layers. By comparing the results, it can be seen that the applied procedure has strong capacity in identification of crack and its size in the rotor system.

The positive benefits of early faults detection in rotating systems have led scientists to develop automated methods. Although unbalancing is the most prevalent defect in rotor systems, this fault normally is accompanied by other defects such as crack. In this article, an effective self-acting procedure is addressed in identifying shallow cracks in rotor systems throughout the steady-state operation. To classify rotor systems suffering cracks with three various depths, firstly, healthy and cracked systems are modeled by employing the finite element method (FEM). In the following, systems' vibration signals are calculated in different situations numerically; for pre-processing stage, the persistence spectrum is implemented. Finally, by using a supervised convolutional neural network (CNN), rotor systems are classified by regarding the crack depths. The result of the testing step revealed that this hybrid method has rational capacity in distinguishing shallow cracks in steady-state operation where many other methods are somehow powerless.

To evaluate the control performance of the PID controller for the cars, a 3D car dynamic model with 8-DOF which can fully reflect the pitch and roll of the car body is proposed in this study. The PID controller is then researched and applied to control the active suspension system of the cars under the different excitations of the road surface and the various car speeds. The control performance for improving the ride comfort of the driver is evaluated via the root-mean-square (RMS) of acceleration responses of the vertical driver’s seat, pitching and rolling car body angles. The research results show that the PID controller for the car suspension system have an obvious impact on reducing the vibration and controlling the car body shaking in comparison with the passive suspension system.

In order to study the influence of heavy truck dynamic parameters on the vehicle’s ride comfort under the random road excitation, the weighted RMS (root-mean-square) acceleration responses of the vertical driver’s seat and cab pitch angle are chosen as objective function, a dynamic model of the vehicle with 10 degrees of freedom is established to simulate and analyze the results. The influence of different parameters of all the suspension systems of the vehicle, such as the stiffness and damping of the suspensions of the seat, cab, vehicle, and wheel, on the vertical driver’s seat and cab pitch angle are respectively analyzed. The study results show that the influence of the stiffness and damping parameters in the suspension systems on the vehicle ride comfort is very obvious. The vehicle’s ride comfort changes worse with the increase of the suspension stiffness and the reduction of the suspension damping, and vice versa. The study proposes an optimal range of the stiffness and damping parameters for the optimal design and control of the vehicle suspension systems, concurrently, the study can also provide a theoretical basis for the suspension system designed for heavy trucks.