• Tribology and Lubricants
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.74-80
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• 1998

The morphologies of the wear particles are directly indicative of wear process occuring in the machine. The analysis of wear particle morphology can therefore provide very early detection of a fault and can also ofen facilitate a dignosis. For this work, the neural network was applied to identify friction coefficient through four shape parameters (50% volumetric diameter, aspect, roundness and reflectivity) of wear debris generated from the machine. The averages of these parameters were used as inputs to the network. It is shown that collect identification of friction coefficient depends on the ranges of these shape parameters learned. The various kinds of the wear debris had a different pattern characteristics and recognized relation between the friction condition and materials very well by neural network. We discuss how the network determines difference in wear debris feature, and this approach can be applied for machine condition monitoring and fault diagnosis.