Aircraft Air Compressor Bearing Diagnosis Using Discriminant Analysis and Cooperative Genetic Algorithm and Neural Network Approaches

Abstract

Monitoring and diagnosis of rotating machines has become an effective and indispensable tool for the efficient and timely detection of defects, avoiding then incidents that can have serious economic and human consequences. Bearings are the most sensitive parts of these machines; this is why special attention must be paid to its monitoring. This paper presents a methodology for diagnosing an aircraft air compressor bearing using neural networks that have been optimized by genetic algorithms. We used in our study a database of vibratory signals that were recorded on a test bench from bearings with different defects. The faults features are extracted from these noisy signals using the estimate of the spectral density. The diagnostic capacity of obtained model has been demonstrated by a comparative study with two other automatic classifiers, which are discriminant analysis and neural networks whose training has been done with the Back-Propagation algorithm. This approach has the advantage of simultaneously ensuring the optimal structure of the neural network and accomplishing its learning. The importance of this study is the construction of a diagnostic tool that is characterized by efficiency, speed of decision making and ease of implementation not only on the computers on the ground, but also on the mounted calculators on aircraft.