Techniques for machine condition monitoring and diagnostics
are gaining acceptance in various industrial sectors. They have
proved to be effective in predictive or proactive maintenance
and quality control. Along with the fast development of computer
and sensing technologies, sensors are being increasingly used
to monitor machine status. In recent years, the fusion of
multisensor data has been applied to diagnose machine faults.
In this study, multisensors are used to collect signals of rotating
imbalance vibration of a test rig. The characteristic features
of each vibration signal are extracted with an auto-regressive
(AR) model. Data fusion is then implemented with a
Cascade-Correlation (CC) neural network. The results clearly
show that multisensor data-fusion-based diagnostics outperforms
the single sensor diagnostics with statistical significance.