Fault Diagnosis of Helical Gearbox through Vibration Signals using J48 Decision Tree and Wavelet

Objectives: Gear plays an efficient role in power transmission. Minor faults in gears can lead to severe faults. The vibration analysis can be used for determining the causes of the faults which are raised while ongoing operation. This study determines the usage of machine learning algorithm for condition monitoring of helical gearbox. Methods/Statistical Analysis: The vibration signals were taken by using accelerometers from helical gearbox in which artificial faults were incorporated before testing. By using Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) feature extraction was done. The feature selection and feature classification was done by using J48 algorithm and subsequent results were observed. Findings: The classification accuracy of helical gearbox using Discrete Wavelet Transform was observed to be 89.28% which itself shows its efficiency. In feature extraction maximum accuracy of 89.06% was obtained by sym 8 wavelet. During feature selection and classification many modifications in algorithm were made i.e. minimum number of object, confidence factor etc. Suitable readings of the modifications were applied and feature classification was done. Improvements: Different Discrete Wavelet Transforms were compared taken from vibration signal proved Sym 8 Discrete Wavelet Transform is the best one to be used in this scenario. The methodology yielded a satisfactory classification accuracy of 89.28%, which is higher than what was obtained by similar experiments with different methodology till date. The results and their analysis are discussed in the study. The performance of this methodology may be further improved by using different classifiers and different wavelets.