In this paper an attempt has been made to develop an expert system called VIBMASTER to help the plant maintenance persons in diagnosing the cause of excessive vibration and hence need for maintenance of rotating machinery. In the proposed expert system a data base has been compiled from Standards, Codes, Journals, Handbooks and Rules from Maintenance Manuals related to maintenance engineering and management. The transfer of knowledge from these sources into the expert system knowledge base for maintenance is achieved with knowledge engineering procedures. The developed software tool can identify the fault(s) using vibration velocity of machine and signatures. The proposed system has been developed on Microsoft Windows environment and is in Visual C++. The expert system has been validated with bearing data of a Boiler Feed Pump train of a large utility thermal power plant. The expert system also embed remedial measures to tackle the fault arising out of excess vibration.
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