Application of Artificial Intelligence to Gearbox Fault Diagnosis

Abstract

Gearboxes are employed in a wide variety of applications, ranging from small domestic appliances to the rather gigantic power plants and marine propulsion systems. Gearbox failure may not only result in significant financial losses resulting from downtime of machinery but may also place human life at risk. Gearbox failure in transmission systems of warships and single engine aircraft, beside other military applications, is unacceptable. The criticality of the gearbox in rotary machines has resulted in enormous effort on the part of researchers to develop new and efficient methods of diagnosing faults in gearboxes so that timely rectification can be undertaken before catastrophic failure occurs. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a significant milestone in automated gearbox fault diagnosis (GFD). This chapter reviews over a decade of research efforts on fault diagnosis of gearboxes with AI techniques. Some of areas of AI in GFD which still merit attention have been identified and discussed at the end of the chapter.