Abstract
The morphological analysis of wear debris can provide early a failure diagnosis in lubricated moving system. It can be effective to analyze operating conditions of oil-lubricated tribological system with shape characteristics of wear debris in a lubricant. But, in order to predict and recognize an operating condition of lubricated machine, it is needed to analyze and to identify shape characteristics of wear debris. Therefore, If the morphological characteristics of wear debris are recognized by computer image analysis using the neural network algorithm, it is possible to recognize operating condition of hydraulic driving members. In this study, wear debris in the lubricating oil are extracted by membrane filter (0.45$\mu\textrm{m}$), and the quantitative values of shape parameters of wear debris are calculated by the digital image processing. This shape parameters are studied and identified by the artificial neural network algorithm. The result of study could be applied to prediction and to recognition of the operating condition of hydraulic driving members in lubricated machine systems.