Development of an Intelligent Rotating Machinery Diagnostics Programme
Rotating machines are one of the most wide spread items of equimpnet in the industrial plants; hence the reliable operation is of great practical importance. Analyses show that when a run-to-failure philosophy is adopted in rotating machinery maintenance, their downtime is usually three to four times longer comparing to a periodic or proactive maintenance approach. A successful proactive maintenance program requires an integration of several diagnostic procedures into an intelligent data processing system. Such a system allows detection of a broad range of faults in an early stage. The main aim of this paper is to present current results of our development of an intelligent rotating machinery diagnostics program for detecting a broad range of faults from signals which can be measured non-destructively and on-line. The main motivation is to develop computationally efficient algorithm that can be implemented on a standard (low-cost) platform. In that respect we have developed a test rotating machine equipped with accelerometers, temperature sensors and sensors for lubricating oil characterization. In this paper we focus on gear-box faults and a feature extraction procedure based on non-parametric statistical concepts as suggested and demonstrated on experimental data.