Author(s)

Faisal Al Thobiani¹, Van Tung Tran², Tiedo Tinga²

¹Faculty of Marine Science, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, KSA.
²Faculty of Engineering Technology, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands.

Thermal image, or thermogram, becomes a new type of signal for machine condition monitoring and fault diagnosis due to the capability to display real-time temperature distribution and possibility to indicate the machine’s operating condition through its temperature. In this paper, an investigation of using the second-order statistical features of thermogram in association with minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR) feature selection and simplified fuzzy ARTMAP (SFAM) classification is conducted for rotating machinery fault diagnosis. The thermograms of different machine conditions are firstly preprocessed for improving the image contrast, removing noise, and cropping to obtain the regions of interest (ROIs). Then, an enhanced algorithm based on bi-dimensional empirical mode decomposition is implemented to further increase the quality of ROIs before the second-order statistical features are extracted from their gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM). The highly relevant features to the machine condition are selected from the total feature set by mRMR and are fed into SFAM to accomplish the fault diagnosis. In order to verify this investigation, the thermograms acquired from different conditions of a fault simulator including normal, misalignment, faulty bearing, and mass unbalance are used. This investigation also provides a comparative study of SFAM and other traditional methods such as back-propagation and probabilistic neural networks. The results show that the second-order statistical features used in this framework can provide a plausible accuracy in fault diagnosis of rotating machinery.

Thermal Images, Second-Order Statistical Features, Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix, Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance, Rotating Machinery Fault Diagnosis, Simplified Fuzzy ARTMAP

Thobiani, F. , Tran, V. and Tinga, T. (2017) An Approach to Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery Using the Second-Order Statistical Features of Thermal Images and Simplified Fuzzy ARTMAP. Engineering, 9, 524-539. doi: 10.4236/eng.2017.96033.