Intelligent Condition Monitoring and Diagnosis System: A Computational Intelligent Approach

Human beings used to use their own senses and experience to monitor the condition of machinery, but they have a habit of forming labor unions, so a substitute is being sought in computer intelligence. Wang (production and quality engineering, Norwegian U. of Science and Technology), describes one approach to using advanced instrumentation to quantify the health or condition of industrial equipment, so that problems can be diagnosed early in their development and corrected by suitable maintenance, before they become serious enough to cause plant breakdown. His example is an intelligent monitoring system for a centrifugal pump system using multiple layered feed forward artificial neural networks, which effectively avoids the necessity for manually setting up accurate mathematical descriptions. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR