2011 International Conference on Transportation, Mechanical, and Electrical Engineering (TMEE)
December 16-18, Changchun, China
Artificial Neural Network-based Fault Diagnostics of
an Electric Motor using Vibration Monitoring
Mona Khatami Rad
Department of Industrial Engineering
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)
Skudai, Johor Bahru, Malaysia
mona.khatamirad@gmail.com
Amin Noshadi
Department of System Dynamics and Control
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)
Skudai, Johor Bahru, Malaysia
amin.noshadi@gmail.com
Abstract—In this study, a motor condition diagnostic was
achieved through the implementation of an Artificial Neural
Network (ANN), successfully applying into a predictive
maintenance system. Electrical motors were monitored to
obtain data to train the ANN. Out of these monitoring,
vibration signatures were used as the input layer, and the
motor condition was used as the expert training information.
The main objective was to apply neural networks to a
condition based predictive maintenance in order to detect the
type of system’s failure. As a result, the expert system can be
utilized to decrease the possible failures in operating system
and increase the availability and effectiveness of a system.
Keywords- Condition Based Monitoring; Expert System;
Fault Detection; Neural Network; Vibration Monitoring
VI. INTRODUCTION
In the past years, most of machine equipment and
systems faced by failure and malfunction. When the cause
of system failure had been found, some actions needed to
remove the cause. The time needed to repair the failure and
eliminate the malfunction, cause of stoppage the machine or
system operation. It affects the company performance in
such a way as decreasing the performance of production
equipment efficiency and regularly, increasing the
breakdown, maximizing the production loss from failure,
decreasing reliability of the operation system. Generally,
failure causes of disruption, waste, accident, and
inconvenience and it effect on system’s operation. Applying
the properly maintenance is applicable for preventive failure
in operating system and increase the availability of a
system. Maintenance has been seen as an essential activity
to keep the production process going. For maintenance
planning some tools such as total productive maintenance
(TPM), reliability centered maintenance (RCM), condition
based maintenance (CBM), and root cause analysis are
sometimes offered as all encompassing solution [1].
978-1-4577-1701-7/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
Mohammadehsan Torabizadeh
Department of Industrial Engineering
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM)
Skudai, Johor Bahru, Malaysia
ehsan.torabizadeh@gmail.com
One strategy using improved maintenance operation is
condition based maintenance. It is a technique based on
detecting initial failures. When failure has been initiated,
this methodology allows trend monitoring and prediction of
function failure. Expert systems can be adapted for machine
condition based monitoring data interpretation due to the
ability to identify systematic reasoning processes. The use
of expert systems would allow a greater analysis throughput
as well as enabling technicians to perform routine analysis.
Some techniques can be used such as neural network, fuzzy
logic, and genetic algorithm to identify the model of the
system for predicting the failure. In this project, condition
based maintenance will be applied to the electric motor as
our case of the study using vibration monitoring and neural
network for system identification as an expert system [2].
Over the last years, the concept of maintenance has
changed during the time. More complex designs of system
that need new methods of maintenance are cause of these
changes. Changes in the concept of maintenance duties and
organization are cause of it. The changes that have occurred
during this period are well documented by Moubray that
considered the first generation of maintenance according to
the needs of industry on reactive maintenance [3], Duffuaa
Antony that mentioned to scheduled overhauls and
mechanized industry [4] and also Narayana [5] proposed
reliability of maintenance and considering to predictive
maintenance.
Nowadays, by considering to some issues in extensive
automation, reliability, safety, and availability in production
processes and expert system, performing the maintenance
and the methods of it has more extension. So, appropriate
maintenance and efficiently working condition for as long
as possible has the important role for preventing variety of
failures.
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 VII. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS Vibration data that related to the motor with
This section presents the results that were obtained from misalignment failure and respective peaks’ frequencies and
experimentation done to reach the desired objectives of the amplitudes are shown in Table II.
thesis. Prior to performing the experiments, a methodology
TABLE II. NN INPUTS OF MISALIGNMENT MOTOR
was developed to perform CBM based on vibration for
electric motor using vibration monitoring. The system will Peak Values
acquire data through a data acquisition system that monitors
Freq. Amp. Freq. Amp. Freq. Amp.
key equipment variables such as amplitude and frequency.
Once the data is obtained and analyzed, data will be 1 15 0.360433 11 285 0.0927443 21 500 0.0581535
processed using an NN that will identify patterns in the data
to characterize equipment operations conditions and 2 50 0.0700929 12 300 0.124527 22 525 0.0722874

eventually to predict equipment failure. This approach will

3 115 0.0930419 13 325 0.0890249 23 540 0.0651089
help identify potential failures in advance to schedule
preventive maintenance actions for electric motors; the 4 135 0.267354 14 340 0.167672 24 590 0.0706508
ultimate purpose of this predictive maintenance system is to
5 160 0.248645 15 365 0.12064 25 620 0.0579117
minimize unscheduled equipment failures, maintenance
costs, and loss of production. It is also intended to improve 6 190 0.0835945 16 380 0.217048 26 630 0.0512539
production efficiency and product quality.
7 205 0.0672847 17 410 0.0696466 27 645 0.050975
Electric motor, due to the rotating nature of its internal
components, produces vibrations. Hence, Accelerometers 8 215 0.0815116 18 425 0.107808 28 660 0.051321
were used to measure the vibration of motor’s components.
9 260 0.077569 19 470 0.0853612
Accelerometers strategically placed in points next to the
motor and allow acceleration of the machine over time to be 10 270 0.0990116 20 485 0.0728825
measured. Therefore, the accelerometer was placed on a
vertical, horizontal and axial position on the top part of the
electric motor and shows the measurement [6]. There are
many different failures for electric motor, but the most Likewise, the vibration data of the motor with bearing
important failures are due to unbalance, misalignment, and fault and its peaks points’ frequencies and their
bearing fault. In order to design an expert system to be able corresponding amplitudes are shown in Table III
to predict the failure of electric motor, vibration data of consequently.
three failed motor due to unbalance, misalignment, and
bearing were fed into NN separately to train and test the TABLE III. NN INPUTS OF BEARING FAULT
network [7]. Vibration measurement of a failed motor due to
unbalance situation is presented in Table I. According to Peak Values

this table, characteristic of a failed motor can be classified Freq. Amp. Freq. Amp. Freq. Amp.
from its vibration peaks which represent the motor’s natural
frequencies and their amplitudes. 1 15 0.7255812 11 185 0.440977 21 420 0.356843

2 30 0.718373 12 205 0.636545 22 460 0.365993

TABLE I. NN INPUTS OF UNBALANCE MOTOR
3 60 0.510828 13 225 0.599872 23 480 0.228671
Peak Values

4 70 0.855472 14 240 0.774314 24 530 0.215281

Freq. Amp. Freq. Amp. Freq. Amp

5 90 0.577481 15 260 0.536939 25 550 0.224208

1 15 0.309476 11 295 0.0676195 21 685 0.0802284

6 100 0.729308 16 295 1.9632 26 570 0.368894

2 70 0.06284 12 325 0.148573 22 705 0.0935998

7 120 1.46784 17 325 1.1932 27 600 0.208512

3 105 0.0525557 13 355 0.194936 23 720 0.106209

8 135 1.71466 18 350 0.435026 28 880 0.201296

4 130 0.171522 14 370 0.135741 24 730 0.054434

9 150 1.0102 19 375 0.56595

5 150 0.13721 15 400 0.165924 25 745 0.0775132

10 165 0.327162 20 390 0.687948

6 170 0.208363 16 435 0.1734 26 760 0.129716

7 195 0.0594553 17 475 0.113889 27 790 0.0699441

8 255 0.0523326 18 560 0.0571864 28 805 0.0656296

With the obtained data from three different motors, the
9 265 0.0790754 19 655 0.0713761 neural network can be applied for the system identification
and modelling. Once the system designed and modeled
10 280 0.0553825 20 670 0.078908 accurately using neural network, it can be used as an expert
system to determine the probability of failure of a working

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motor when operator measures the vibration of motor and
feed the data to the neural network modelled system.
In the case of feed-forward NN training it is necessary to
present not only input vectors but also target outputs. For
the three-output detectors these outputs are as follows:
x [1; 0; 0]: for an unbalance problem
x [0; 1; 0]: for a misalignment problem
x [0; 0; 1]: for a bearing fault
There are two input nodes namely frequency and
amplitude, each node corresponding to a moment input; and
an output layer consisting of three nodes, each node
corresponding to one of the three primary faults under
consideration (see Fig. 1). The number of hidden layers can
be varied. The number of neurons in each hidden layer can
also be varied.
Figure 1. Schematic diagram of NN.
Once the learning process starts, the neural network is so
designed that the weights and the thresholds between
different layers adjust automatically, so as to minimize the
mean square error, between the actual network output and
the targeted output. In minimizing the error, the other
network parameters like moment, learning rate, number of
hidden layers and nodes in each layer are to be adjusted [8].
VIII. IMPLEMENTION OF NEURAL NETWORK
For this project, more than 10 different types of neural
networks were tested. Out of them one gave better results.
So, to design an accurate expert system using NN, It is
necessary to define the optimized number of hidden layer
and neurons and type of the learning function and training
function.
All steps for applied NN are as follow in summary:
x Initialize weights and bias units to small values
x Input layer uses a tansig transfer function with
(2 × 84) inputs
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x Hidden layer with 10 and 20 hidden neurons (uses
a tansig transfer function) and output layer has
(3 × 84) output units
x Gradient descent back-propagation to find
optimised weights and bias units of each layer
x Simulate network for a normal input data to
validate and test the modeled network
The network designed for this case consists of (2 × 84)
inputs i.e. failures’ frequencies and their corresponding
amplitudes, four hidden layer and each layer with 10 hidden
neurons, (3 × 84) outputs i.e. three different failures, and
with a Bayesian regulation back propagation training
function (Trainbr) and the learning function is hyperbolic
tangent sigmoid function (Tansig). The NN designed for
trainbr is shown in Fig. 2.
Figure 2. Trainbr Network.
IX. NEURAL NETWORK RESULTS
Each input was related to a type of failure. For instance,
first 28 inputs for unbalance motor, second 28 inputs for
misalignment motor and third 28 inputs for bearing fault.
The input fed to the NN for system modeling and for this
reason that characteristic of each fault should be shown in
binary for output result.
In fact, for first 28 inputs the suitable output of 1 should
be given. Output 2 should be given one for 28 to 56 inputs
and also, output3 for input 56 to 84 should be given one.
The results of the trainbr will be presented in this section.
Fig. 3 is related to the trainbr and unbalance motor. The first
28 input should be corresponded to the 1 output that it
showed the system model accurately. In other word, the
trained output1 (dashed line) should be matched to the
desired output1.

Figure 3. Accuracy of trainbr for unbalance motor
Fig. 4 is related to the trainbr and misalignment motor.
The second 28 input should be corresponded to the 1 output
that it showed the system model accurately. In other word,
the trained output2 (dash line) should be matched to the
desired output2.
Figure 4. Accuracy of trainbr for misalignment motor
Fig. 5 is related to the trainbr and bearing fault. Last 28
inputs should be corresponded to the 1 output that it showed
the system model accurately. In other word, the trained
output3 (dash line) should be matched to the desired
output3.
Figure 5. Accuracy of trainbr for misalignment motor
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With obtained results of the accuracy of trainbr graphs,
we find out the trainbr give the suitable result and the
desired outpus are match to the trained outputs and its
accuracy is high.
Fig. 6 shows accumulative errors for all of the three
outputs. Acoording to this figure, the errors has their
minimum values. So, this method is very accurate.
Figure 6. Accumulative errors for all outputs
Training errors, validation errors, and test errors of
trainbr learning method appears in Fig. 7. It shows how the
system trained by NN. Each line that in any iteration has its
related performance, for instance the blue line relates to the
train, green line relates to validation and red line relates to
the test of the modeled system. The iteration continues until
the mean squared error (MSE) of the system minimize.
Also, the best validation performance is (8.8*10-6) at epoch
203.
Figure 7. Trainbr performance
 V. RESULTS VALIDATION
In this section, to validate the ability of the developed
network in predicting the possible failures, vibration data of
a failed motor with distinct failure should be used. Five
hundred points including amplitudes (Amp) over frequency
(see Fig. 8) of failed motor have fed into the expert system
as input which was designed before, and the results obtained
from neural network are shown in Fig. 9.
Figure 8. Vibration Data of misalignment motor
As mentioned earlier, the output for each type of failure
was classified according to [1; 0; 0] for unbalance motor,
[0;1;0] for misalignment motor and [0;0;1] for bearing fault.
Therefore, final results for validation are shown in 3-
dimensional graph. Each axis represents one failure. For
instance; when the position of the points are on the x-axis
they represent the unbalance failure of the motor, points on
the Y-axis present the misalignment motor and position of
points on Z-axis present the bearing fault.
Figure 9. Simulation result and accuracy
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From Fig. 9 we find that the distribution of output points
is highly concentrated in Y-axis and it represents the failure
because of misalignment failure. Consequently, it is
approved that the proposed prognosis NN method is very
useful expert system for failure prediction of machinery.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper, condition based maintenance (CBM) is
applied to the electric motor by using vibration monitoring.
Neural network as an expert system is applied to electric
motor for system identification by using the obtained data
from vibration monitoring. Finally, simulation results
successfully demonstrated that the proposed expert system
could be utilized to detect the type of failure associated to
electric motor and to predict the system useful lifetime
which is pivotal for predictive maintenance in industrial
application.
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