Multi-Sensor Data Fusion and Vibro-Acoustic Feature Engineering for Health Monitoring and Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Hydraulic Valves

The reliability of hydraulic valves is critical for the safety and efficiency of industrial systems. While vibration and pressure sensors are widely deployed for condition monitoring, leveraging the heterogeneous data from these multi-sensor systems for accurate remaining useful life (RUL) prediction remains challenging due to noise, outliers, and inconsistent sampling rates. This study proposes a sensor data-driven framework that integrates multi-step signal preprocessing, time-frequency feature fusion, and a machine learning model to address these challenges. Specifically, raw data from vibration and pressure sensors are first harmonized through a multi-step preprocessing pipeline including Hampel filtering for impulse noise, Robust Scaler for outlier mitigation, Butterworth low-pass filtering for effective frequency band retention, and resampling to a unified rate. Subsequently, vibro-acoustic features are extracted from the preprocessed sensor signals, including Fast Fourier Transform (FFT)-based frequency domain features and Wavelet Packet Decomposition (WPD)-based time-frequency features, to comprehensively characterize the valve's degradation. A health indicator (HI) is constructed by fusing the most sensitive features. Finally, a Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA)-optimized Random Forest model is developed for HI prediction, which strongly correlates with RUL. Validated on the UCI hydraulic condition monitoring dataset through 20-run Monte-Carlo cross-validation, our method achieves a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.0319 ± 0.0090, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.0109 ± 0.0014, and a coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.9828 ± 0.0097, demonstrating consistent performance across different data partitions. These results confirm the framework's effectiveness in translating multi-sensor data into actionable insights for predictive maintenance, offering a viable solution for industrial health management systems.