Development of a virtual environment for fault diagnosis in rotary machinery

Component fault analysis is a very widely researched area and requires a great deal of knowledge and expertise to establish a consistent and accurate tool for analysis. This paper will discuss a virtual diagnostic tool for fault detection of rotary machinery. The diagnostic tool has been developed using FMCELL software, which provides a 3-D graphical visualization environment to modeling rotary machinery with virtual data acquisition capabilities. The developed diagnostic tool provides a virtual testbed with suitable graphical user interfaces for rapid diagnostic fault analysis of machinery. In this paper, we will discuss details of this newly developed virtual diagnostic model using FMCELL software and present our approach for diagnostics of a mechanical bearing test bed (TSU-BTB). Furthermore, we will provide some examples of how the virtual diagnostic environment can be used for performing machinery fault diagnostics. Using a frequency pattern matching superimposing technique, the model is proven to be able to detect primary faults in machines with fair accuracy and reliability.