Anomaly-Detection Framework for Thrust Bearings in OWC WECs Using a Feature-Based Autoencoder

An unsupervised anomaly-detection framework is proposed and field validated for thrust-bearing monitoring in the impulse turbine of a shoreline oscillating water-column (OWC) wave energy converter (WEC) off Jeju Island, Korea. Operational monitoring is constrained by nonstationary sea states, scarce fault labels, and low-rate supervisory logging at 20 Hz. To address these conditions, a 24 h period of normal operation was median-filtered to suppress outliers, and six physically motivated time-domain features were computed from triaxial vibration at 10 s intervals: absolute mean; standard deviation (STD); root mean square (RMS); skewness; shape factor (SF); and crest factor (CF, peak divided by RMS). A feature-based autoencoder was trained to reconstruct the feature vectors, and reconstruction error was evaluated with an adaptive threshold derived from the moving mean and moving standard deviation to accommodate baseline drift. Performance was assessed on a 2 h test segment that includes a 40 min simulated fault window created by doubling the triaxial vibration amplitudes prior to preprocessing and feature extraction. The detector achieved accuracy of 0.99, precision of 1.00, recall of 0.98, and F1 score of 0.99, with no false positives and five false negatives. These results indicate dependable detection at low sampling rates with modest computational cost. The chosen feature set provides physical interpretability under the 20 Hz constraint, and denoising stabilizes indicators against marine transients, supporting applicability in operational settings. Limitations associated with simulated faults are acknowledged. Future work will incorporate long-term field observations with verified fault progressions, cross-site validation, and integration with digital-twin-enabled maintenance.