A Newly Robust Fault Detection and Diagnosis Method for High-Speed Trains

Incipient faults in high-speed trains are usually masked by noises and disturbances from process and sensors, which severely increases the difficulty of incipient fault detection and diagnosis. By introducing Hellinger distance into multivariate statistical analysis framework, this paper develops a robust detection and diagnosis method for incipient faults under the principal component analysis. The proposed method can detect all incipient sensor faults in traction systems of high-speed trains in real time by comparing reference probability density functions (PDFs) with the online estimated PDFs. According to the fault detection information, an accurate fault diagnosis can be achieved online through Bayesian inference. Key advantages of the proposed method are its salient robustness to unknown noises and disturbances, as well as the high sensitivity to incipient faults. In addition, the proposed method does not require any information on system models of high-speed trains or any human intervention. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been firstly proven by mathematical derivations and then been verified by numerical simulations. Finally, the proposed method has been applied to the practical experiment platform of the high-speed trains.