Condition monitoring and classification of rotating machinery using wavelets and hidden Markov models

Condition monitoring and classification of machinery state is of great practical significance in manufacturing industry, because it provides updated information regarding machine status on-line, thus avoiding the production loss and minimising the chances of catastrophic machine failure. In this paper, the condition classification is based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) processing information obtained from vibration signals. We present an on-line fault classification system with an adaptive model re-estimation algorithm. The machinery condition is identified by selecting the HMM which maximises the probability of a given observation sequence. The proper selection of the observation sequence is a key step in the development of an HMM-based classification system. In this paper, the classification system is validated using observation sequences based on the wavelet modulus maxima distribution obtained from real vibration signals, which has been proved to be effective in fault detection in previous research.