Early fault detection in gearboxes based on support vector machines and multilayer perceptron with a continuous wavelet transform

•The study was undertaken to evaluate early fault detection of a gearbox using ANN.•Selected coefficients from CWT were used as input data for the neural networks.

One of the research problems investigated these days is early fault detection. To this end, advanced signal processing algorithms are employed. The present paper makes an attempt at early fault detection in a gearbox. In order to evaluate its technical condition, artificial neural networks were used. Early fault detection based on support vector machines is a relatively new and rarely employed method for evaluating condition of machines, particularly gearboxes. The available literature offers very promising results of using this method. In order to compare the obtained results, a multilayer perceptron network was created. Such standard neural network ensures high effectiveness. The vibration signal obtained from a sensor is seldom a material for direct analysis. First, it needs to be processed to bring out the informative part of the signal. To this end, a wavelet transform was used. The presented results concern both a “raw” vibration signal and processed one, investigated for two neural networks. The wavelet transform has proved to improve significantly the accuracy of condition evaluation and the results obtained by the two networks are consistent with one another.

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