Recent progress on mechanical condition monitoring and fault diagnosis

Abstract

Mechanical equipments are widely used in various industrial applications. Generally working in severe conditions, mechanical equipments are subjected to progressive deterioration of their state. The mechanical failures account for more than 60% of breakdowns of the system. Therefore, the identification of impending mechanical fault is crucial to prevent the system from malfunction. This paper discusses the most recent progress in the mechanical condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. Excellent work is introduced from the aspects of the fault mechanism research, signal processing and feature extraction, fault reasoning research and equipment development. An overview of some of the existing methods for signal processing and feature extraction is presented. The advantages and disadvantages of these techniques are discussed. The review result suggests that the intelligent information fusion based mechanical fault diagnosis expert system with self-learning and self-updating abilities is the future research trend for the condition monitoring fault diagnosis of mechanical equipments. © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.