An Expert System for Rotating Machine Fault Detection Using Vibration Signal Analysis

Accurate and early detection of machine faults is an important step in the preventive maintenance of industrial enterprises. It is essential to avoid unexpected downtime as well as to ensure the reliability of equipment and safety of humans. In the case of rotating machines, significant information about machine’s health and condition is present in the spectrum of its vibration signal. This work proposes a fault detection system of rotating machines using vibration signal analysis. First, a dataset of 3-dimensional vibration signals is acquired from large induction motors representing healthy and faulty states. The signal conditioning is performed using empirical mode decomposition technique. Next, multi-domain feature extraction is done to obtain various combinations of most discriminant temporal and spectral features from the denoised signals. Finally, the classification step is performed with various kernel settings of multiple classifiers including support vector machines, K-nearest neighbors, decision tree and linear discriminant analysis. The classification results demonstrate that a hybrid combination of time and spectral features, classified using support vector machines with Gaussian kernel achieves the best performance with 98.2% accuracy, 96.6% sensitivity, 100% specificity and 1.8% error rate.