Habibi, Saeid (McMaster University)

Purpose

Product quality and reliability continues to be one of the top priorities for manufacturers, and these must be maintained in spite of the need for lighter parts and lower manufacturing costs. As the Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) move to leaner structures, the demands placed on the equipment suppliers to assure quality and reliability of the products they produce is increasing. Typically suppliers have fewer internal resources than the OEMs with less capability and expertise to perform the required quality and reliability analysis. At McMaster, we have developed and implemented a Fault Detection and Diagnostic (FDD) strategy for a range of applications including electric motor and internal combustion engine testing. In the applications considered, our FDD algorithm has achieved a fault detection rate of 100% and a diagnosis rate of 96%. In these applications, acoustic and vibration measurements were used in a combined form in conjunction with Principal Components Analysis, Wavelets and digital filtering. This is a considerable improvement compared to current industry standards; these employ electrical and mechanical tests against thresholds that are not able to detect all faults and have limited capability in fault diagnosis._x000D_