Today's industry uses increasingly complex machines, some with extremely demanding performance criteria. Failed machines can lead to economic loss and safety problems due to unexpected production stoppages. Fault diagnosis in the condition monitoring of these machines is crucial for increasing machinery availability and reliability.Fault diagnosis of machinery is often a difficult and daunting task. To be truly effective, the process needs to be automated to reduce the reliance on manual data interpretation. It is the aim of this research to automate this process using data from machinery vibrations. This thesis focuses on the design, development, and application of an automatic diagnosis procedure for rolling element bearing faults. Rolling element bearings are representative elements in most industrial rotating machinery. Besides, these elements can also be tested economically in the laboratoryusing relatively simple test rigs.Novel modern signal processing methods were applied to vibration signals collectedfrom rolling element tests to destruction. These included three advanced timefrequencysignal processing techniques, best basis Discrete Wavelet Packet Analysis (DWPA), Matching Pursuit (MP), and Basis Pursuit (BP). This research presents the first application of the Basis Pursuit to successfully diagnosing rolling element faults. Meanwhile, Best basis DWPA and Matching Pursuit were also benchmarked with the Basis Pursuit, and further extended using some novel ideas particularly on the extraction of defect related features.The DWPA was researched in two aspects: i) selecting a suitable wavelet, and ii) choosing a best basis. To choose the most appropriate wavelet function and decomposition tree of best basis in bearing fault diagnostics, several different wavelets and decomposition trees for best basis determination were applied andcomparisons made. The Matching Pursuit and Basis Pursuit techniques were effected by choosing a powerful wavelet packet dictionary. These algorithms were also studied in their ability to extract precise features as well as their speed in achieving a result. The advantage and disadvantage of these techniques for feature extraction of bearing faults were further evaluated. An additional contribution of this thesis is the automation of fault diagnosis by using Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). Most of work presented in the current literature has been concerned with the use of a standard pre-processing technique - the spectrum. This research employed additional pre-processing techniques such as the spectrogram and DWPA based Kurtosis, as well as the MP and BP features that were subsequently incorporated into ANN classifiers. Discrete Wavelet Packets and Spectra, were derived to extract features by calculating RMS (root mean square), Crest Factor, Variance, Skewness, Kurtosis, and Matched Filter. Certain spikes in Matching Pursuit analysis and Basis Pursuit analysis were also used as features. These various alternative methods of pre-processing for feature extraction were tested, and evaluated with the criteria of the classification performance of NeuralNetworks.Numerous experimental tests were conducted to simulate the real world environment. The data were obtained from a variety of bearings with a series of fault severities. The mechanism of bearing fault development was analysed and further modelled to evaluate the performance of this research methodology.The results of the researched methodology are presented, discussed, and evaluated in the results and discussion chapter of this thesis. The Basis Pursuit technique proved to be effective in diagnostic tasks. The applied Neural Network classifiers were designed as multi layer Feed Forward Neural Networks. Using these Neural Networks, automatic diagnosis methods based on spectrum analysis, DWPA,Matching Pursuit, and Basis Pursuit proved to be effective in diagnosing different conditions such as normal bearings, bearings with inner race and outer race faults, and rolling element faults, with high accuracy.Future research topics are proposed in the final chapter of the thesis to provide perspectives and suggestions for advancing research into fault diagnosis and condition monitoring.
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