Abstract
This paper presents a new fault diagnosis procedure for rotating machinery using the wavelet packets-fractal technology and a radial basis function neural network. The faults of rotating machinery considered in this study include imbalance, misalignment, looseness and imbalance combined with misalignment conditions. When such faults occur, they usually induce non-stationary vibrations to the machine. After measuring the vibration signals, the wavelet packets transform is applied to these signals. The fractal dimension of each frequency bands is extracted and the box counting dimension is used to depict the failure characteristics of the vibration signals. The failure modes are then classified by a radial basis function neural network. An experimental study was performed to evaluate the proposed method and the results show that the method can effectively detect and recognize different kinds of faults of rotating machinery.