Thermal analysis MLP neural network based fault diagnosis on worm gears

The importance of fault diagnoses, in any kind of machinery, can’t be over stated. Any undetected small fault in machinery will most probably rise with time and will cause machinery to shut down thus resulting in both mechanical and more importantly economical loss for the industry. In recent years, researches have been done for the faults diagnosis through the analysis of their vibration and sound signatures. The extraction of those characteristic signatures is a complicated process because complexities in modern day machineries can results in many vibration and sound generating sources. This paper presents a condition based fault diagnoses technique to detect the condition of gear. An experimental setup, consisting of a worm gear driven by an electric motor, was setup to conduct tests under different working conditions. The vibration and sound signature signals of worm gear were examined for normal and faulty conditions under different speeds and oil levels. The collected data was then used for feature extraction, by using Fast Fourier Transform to filter background noise signals and to collect only the signature of the gearbox vibration and sound signals. An MLP (Multilayer Perceptron) Artificial Neural Network Model has been developed to classify the signature signals. A thermal camera is also used to observe the heating patterns for all those working conditions. With the help of MLP Artificial Neural Network it is possible to predict the speed and oil level of the gearbox and hence a possible fault diagnoses is also feasible.