Intelligent condition monitoring of a gearbox using artificial neural network

Abstract

This paper concentrates on a new procedure which experimentally recognises gears and bearings faults of a typical gearbox system using a multi-layer perceptron neural network. Feature vector which is one of the most significant parameters to design an appropriate neural network was innovated by standard deviation of wavelet packet coefficients. The gear conditions were considered to be normal gearbox and slight- and medium-worn and broken-teeth gears faults and a general bearing fault which were five neurons of output layer with the aim of fault detection and identification. A downscaled 2-layer multi-layer perceptron neural-network-based system with great accuracy was designed to carry out the task. In this research, vibration signals were recognised as the most reliable source to extract the feature vector which were synchronised by piecewise cubic hermite interpolation (PCHI) and pre-processed using the standard deviation of wavelet packet coefficients.