Diagnosis of rotating machines by utilizing a back propagation neural net

There are great needs for checking machine operation status precisely in the iron and steel plants. Rotating machines such as pumps, compressors, and motors are the most important objects in the plant maintenance. In this paper back-propagation neural network is utilized in diagnosing rotating machines. Like the finger print or the voice print of human, the abnormal vibrations due to axis misalignment, shaft bending, rotor unbalance, bolt loosening, and faults in gear and bearing have their own spectra. Like the pattern recognition technique, characteristic. feature vectors are obtained from the power spectra of vibration signals. Then we apply the characteristic feature vectors to a back propagation neural net for the weight training and pattern recognition.