Fault Diagnostics and Prognostics (FDP^TM)

Wireless Monitoring of Rotating Machinery

There are critical rotating components such as bearing and gearbox in generators and motors. Ensuring healthy conditions of these components will reduce system downtime and save maintenance costs. We set up a testbed to demonstrate mechanical faults where accelerometers are used for vibration sensing through the means of wireless data collection. The testbed consists of a flywheel that is attached to a shaft rotated by an electrical motor. Different vibration levels are induced by attaching weights to the flywheel at different locations.

Flywheel testbed. Small screws can be attached to the flywheel at different locations.

Our software tool consists of the following modules: 1) Input module for acquiring accelerometer data; 2) Health monitoring (HM) tool; 3) Output module for displaying health index. The basic idea in the HM tool is to use the fault free data to get a system model. If the system health deviates from the normal status, the health index will increase. The higher the vibration level, the larger the health index will be.

Software demo: The fault cases include normal, 5 g weight, 10 g weight, etc. Data collected at different cases were fed into the tool. The health indices were computed and displayed. The video file - FDP_config3_project_June18.rar, resided in the Download section, provides the complete demo.