A New Study on Vibration Data Acquisition and Intelligent Fault Diagnostic System for Aero-engine

Aero-engine, as one kind of rotating machinery with complex structure and high rotating speed, has complicated vibration faults. Therefore, condition monitoring and fault diagnosis system is very important for airplane security. In this paper, a vibration data acquisition and intelligent fault diagnosis system is introduced. First, the vibration data acquisition part is described in detail. This part consists of hardware acquisition modules and software analysis modules which can realize real-time data acquisition and analysis, off-line data analysis, trend analysis, fault simulation and graphical result display. The acquisition vibration data are prepared for the following intelligent fault diagnosis. Secondly, two advanced artificial intelligent(AI) methods, mapping-based and rule-based, are discussed. One is artificial neural network(ANN) which is an ideal tool for aero-engine fault diagnosis and has strong ability to learn complex nonlinear functions. The other is data mining, another AI method, has advantages of discovering knowledge from massive data and automatically extracting diagnostic rules. Thirdly, lots of historical data are used for training the ANN and extracting rules by data mining. Then, real-time data are input into the trained ANN for mapping-based fault diagnosis. At the same time, extracted rules are revised by expert experience and used for rule-based fault diagnosis. From the results of the experiments, the conclusion is obvious that both the two AI methods are effective on aero-engine vibration fault diagnosis, while each of them has its individual quality. The whole system can be developed in local vibration monitoring and real-time fault diagnosis for aero-engine.