Enhancing the accuracy of blockage detection in centrifugal pump using the majority voting classifier on an unbalanced dataset

Abstract

Blockage in a centrifugal pump can adversely impact its performance. In this study, an experimental facility is developed to simulate three types of blockages (suction, discharge, and simultaneous suction and discharge). To classify these faults and detect their severity, a methodology involving the application of majority voting classifier (MVC) to the pump’s discharge pressure signals is presented. An unbalanced dataset is constructed, where the number of samples for a specific blockage condition decreases with increasing fault severity. Statistical features, entropy features, and entropies meta features are extracted from the signal and ranked using XGBoost and minimum redundancy maximum relevance (MRMR). Subsequently, the optimal features are selected based on the best performing model (Linear Discriminant Analysis) among ten different models. Best four models are selected and ensembled to form MVC. Results show that MVC achieves an accuracy of 89.90% and 88.26% for features selected by XGBoost and MRMR, respectively. Finally, the unbalanced dataset is balanced using synthetic minority oversampling and it is shown that MVC achieves an accuracy of 100% on this balanced dataset for the features selected using both approaches. © IMechE 2024.