Optimal Placement of Sensors Based on Data Fusion for Condition Monitoring of Pulley Group under Speed Variation Condition

Pulley group plays an important role in the transmission of large mechanical equipment. To obtain informative data for condition monitoring, it is very important to optimize sensor placement on the pulley group. However, due to sharp speed fluctuation, heavy load and complex internal structure, sensor placement for acquiring optimal monitoring points is still a challenging task. Therefore, a novel sensor optimization method based on data fusion is proposed. In this method, the Kalman filter is firstly used to refine the collected signal for dealing with the variable noises. Subsequently, the variable periodicity strength of the signal is calculated to recognize the non-stationary characteristics of the measured signal. A data fusion technique based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is then introduced to estimate sensitive components from the multi-source sensor signals for finding out optimal sensor placement points. The method is validated experimentally on a test rig of the pulley group with variable speed conditions. Analysis results show that the proposed method can recognize the optimal sensor placement points for the pulley group.