Automated diagnosis of rolling bearings using MRA and neural networks

Any industry needs an efficient predictive plan in order to optimize the management of resources and improve the economy of the plant by reducing unnecessary costs and increasing the level of safety. A great percentage of breakdowns in productive processes are caused by bearings. They begin to deteriorate from early stages of their functional life, also called the incipient level. This manuscript develops an automated diagnosis of rolling bearings based on the analysis and classification of signature vibrations. The novelty of this work is the application of the methodology proposed for data collected from a quasi-real industrial machine, where rolling bearings support the radial and axial loads the bearings are designed for. Multiresolution analysis (MRA) is used in a first stage in order to extract the most interesting features from signals. Features will be used in a second stage as inputs of a supervised neural network (NN) for classification purposes. Experimental results carried out in a real system show the soundness of the method which detects four bearing conditions (normal, inner race fault, outer race fault and ball fault) in a very incipient stage. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.