An FPGA-Based Multicore System for Real-Time Bearing Fault Diagnosis Using Ultrasampling Rate AE Signals

The demand for online fault diagnosis has recently increased in order to prevent severe unexpected failures in machinery. To address this issue, this paper first proposes a comprehensive bearing fault diagnosis algorithm, which consists of fault signature extraction through time-frequency analysis and one-against-all multiclass support vector machines in order to make reliable decisions. In addition, acoustic emission (AE) signals sampled at 1 MHz are used for the early identification of bearing failures. Despite the fact that the proposed fault diagnosis methodology shows satisfactory classification accuracy, its computation complexity limits its use in real-time applications. Therefore, this paper also presents a high-performance multicore architecture, including 64 processing elements operating at 50 MHz in a Xilinx Virtex-7 field-programmable gate array device to support online fault diagnosis. The experimental results indicate that the multicore approach executes 1339.3x and 1293.1x faster than the high-performance Texas Instrument (TI) TMS320C6713 and TMS320C6748 digital signal processors (DSPs), respectively, by exploiting the massive parallelism inherent in the bearing fault diagnosis algorithm. In addition, the multicore approach outperforms the equivalent sequential approach that runs on the TI DSPs by substantially reducing the energy consumption.