Incipient gear box fault diagnosis using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for feature extraction and classification using artificial neural network (ANN)

An efficient predictive plan is needed for any industry because it can optimize the resources management and improve the economy plant, by reducing unnecessary costs and increasing the level of safety. A great percentage of breakdowns in the productive processes are caused for gear box, they began its deterioration from early stages, also called incipient level. The extracted features from the DWT are used as inputs in a neural network for classification purposes. The results show that the developed method can reliably diagnose different conditions of the gear box. The wavelet transform is used to represent all possible types of transients in vibration signals generated by faults in a gear box. It is shown that the transform provides a powerful tool for condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. The vibration signal of a spur bevel gear box in different conditions is used to demonstrate the application of various wavelets in feature extraction. In this paper fault diagnostics of spur bevel gear box is treated as a pattern classification problem. The major steps in pattern classification are feature extraction, and classification. This paper investigates the use of discrete wavelets for feature extraction and artificial neural network for classification. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.