Fault diagnosis of pneumatic systems with artificial neural network algorithms

Pneumatic systems repeat the identical programmed sequence during their operation. The data was collected when the pneumatic system worked perfectly and had some faults including empty magazine, zero vacuum, inappropriate material, no pressure, closed manual pressure valve, missing drilling stroke, poorly located material, not vacuuming the material and low air pressure. The signals of eight sensors were collected during the entire sequence and the 24 most descriptive features of the data were encoded to present to the ANNs. A synthetic data generation process was proposed to train and test the ANNs better when signals are extremely repetitive from one sequence to other. Two artificial neural networks (ANN) were used for interpretation of the encoded signals. The tested ANNs were Adaptive Resonance Theory 2 (ART2), and Back propagation (Bp). ART2 correctly distinguished the perfect and faulty operations at all the tested vigilance values. It classified 11 faulty and 1 normal modes in seven or eight categories at the best vigilance values. Bp also distinguished perfect and faulty operations without even the slightest uncertainty. In less than 10 cases, it had difficulty identifying the 11 types of possible faults. The average estimation error of the Bp was better than 2.1% of the output range on the test data which was created by deviating the encoded values. The ART2 and Bp performance was found excellent with the proposed encoding and synthetic data generation procedures for extremely repetitive sequential data. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.