Development of a machine learning algorithm for fault detection in a cantilever beam

The mechanical properties of a component change with any type of damage such as crack development, generation of holes, bend, excessive wear, and tear. The change in mechanical properties causes the material to behave differently in terms of noise and vibration under different loading conditions. Thus, the present study aims to develop an artificial neural network model using vibration signal data for early fault detection in a cantilever beam. The discrete wavelet transform coefficients of de-noised vibration signals were used for model development. The vibration signal was recorded using the OROS OR35 module for different fault conditions (no fault, notch fault, and hole fault) of a cantilever beam. A feed-forward network was trained using backpropagation to map the input features to output. A total of 603 training datasets (201 datasets for three types of cantilever beam—no fault, notch fault, and hole fault) were used for training, and 201 datasets were used for testing of the model. The testing dataset was recorded for a hole fault cantilever beam specimen. The results indicated that the proposed model predicted the test samples with 78.6% accuracy. To increase the accuracy of prediction, more data need to be used in the model training. © The Author(s) 2021.