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Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Deep Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Applied to Motor-Driven Blowers

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

In the rapidly evolving Industry 4.0 space, predictive maintenance is shifting towards data-driven techniques. This shift is driven by advanced computing, reduced costs of sensing, abundantly available data as well as maturing machine learning algorithms. In particular, deep learning, a subset of machine learning, has been rapidly growing compared to traditional machine learning approaches. This is mainly due to its ability to automatically extract features and its high performance in tackling complex problems. Furthermore, predictive maintenance data are often unlabeled because labeling relies heavily on expensive domain expertise. As such, unsupervised techniques are gaining more popularity compared to their supervised counterpart. Therefore, the work at hand focuses on deep unsupervised anomaly detection. Our work capitalizes on previous work conducted at MIT to develop an automated fault detection algorithm that was shown to work with high detection accuracy across diverse applications such as rolling element bearings, plasma etching machines, and milling machines. To further explore the ability of the algorithm to generalize to new applications, we consider the problem of anomaly detection in belt-driven blower-motor units due to variable belt tension. To this end, we instrument a belt-driven motor-blower testbed and generate a dataset featuring electrical and vibration time series data. The dataset contains nominal and anomalous instances at different belt tension and motor speed values. Applying the automated fault detection model to the dataset initially shows that belt problems can be detected but only with a limited accuracy of 12.5%. Upon further experimentation, an accuracy of 64.22% is achieved using a tuned set of hyperparameters on a subset of the data that contains nominal and no-belt conditions only. We conclude that additional hyperparameter tuning may be required in order for the existing algorithm to generalize well to our application. Finally, the dataset and testbed presented here will contribute to exploration of future anomaly detection techniques for time series data.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Master
Department dc:contributor.department
System Design and Management Program.
Grantor dc:publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year dc:date.issued
2022

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Saqr, Tareq E.
Advisors dc:contributor.advisor
  • Boning, Duane S.
  • Lang, Jeffrey H.

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
  • Copyright MIT

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Handle dc:identifier.uri
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/143291
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/143291

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
MIT
Base URL
dspace.mit.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
related terms
citation

Saqr, Tareq E.. Deep Unsupervised Anomaly Detection Applied to Motor-Driven Blowers. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2022. https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/143291