The 'Holy Grail' of reliability

?The Centre for Efficiency & Performance Engineering (CEPE) at the University of Huddersfield is conducting some innovative research in the field of fault diagnosis and predictive maintenance.
With a staff of more than 50 engineers and scientists, covering many research areas, CEPE, represents one of the largest independent group of its type in the world. It is focused on the development of advanced technologies in this field for commercial adoption by industrial end users. 
The Centre undertakes work across all sectors of industry, from shipping to oil refining, from food production to power generation. 
Head of the CEPE Professor Andrew Ball has a clear view of the emerging technologies that will make the biggest impact on predictive maintenance over the next few years.
He lists airborne acoustic monitoring; hardware-in-the-loop and model-based condition monitoring; motor current signature analysis; and the decoding of instantaneous angular speed.
The Centre, therefore, serves as an umbrella for four research groups covering fields that include condition  monitoring, automotive engineering, emissions, biofuels,  fault diagnosis  and prognosis, measurement systems, aerodynamics and marine engineering.
There is a strong international dimension too, including recent arrival Dr Van Tung Tran (pictured bottom left), a Vietnamese-born research fellow attached to both the measurement systems and data analysis group and the condition monitoring and diagnostics groups at the CEPE.
Incipient problems
Tran is an expert in the use of artificial intelligence and data-driven techniques to diagnose and prognose failures in machines. He has also led research in the use of thermal image analysis to provide near-instant information about incipient machine problems.
 “Dr Tran takes conventional maintenance approaches like thermal imaging and he applies artificial intelligence to automate them, to make them more sensitive and to permit not only detecting of faults but assessment of how severe they are,” explains Ball.
 “He can then offer a prognosis, which means a production engineer can gain invaluable knowledge of how much useful life is left in a machine,” continued Ball. “If you are a production engineer you want to make your assets last as long as possible. 
“But you don’t want to run the risk of unnecessary failure.  You need to estimate remaining useful life within a given risk.  It is the Holy Grail of reliability and maintenance - what is the remaining useful life of the asset?”
Ball went on to explain how CEPE grew out of the centre for diagnostic engineering (CDE), which he established after relocating to the University of Huddersfield. 
But when the CDE’s remit and range of expertise broadened, Huddersfield University decided to create the new Centre as an umbrella for several research groupings of experts in various machinery types, measurement systems and analytical methods - including model-based fault detection and diagnosis.
The Centre works on machines and equipment on many types, including reciprocating and centrifugal compressors, multi-stage gearboxes, electric motor drives, centrifugal pumps, bearing systems and turbines, along with all types of static equipment.
Major name clients for the Centre include Rolls-Royce Marine, Network Rail, SINOPEC, BorgWarner, Smiths Group, David Brown, JCB and Princes Foods. 
Indeed, Ball, who is also the University’s pro-vice chancellor for research and enterprise, stresses that the effort of all the scientists who work under the aegis of the CEPE is geared to real-world demand and practical problems.
“Everything is user-led,” he concluded. “We don’t do blue sky thinking.”