
Identification of Fuzzy Measures for Machinery Fault Diagnosis 
Masahiro Tsunoyama
1
, Yuki Imai
1
, Hayato Hori
2
, Hirokazu Jinno
2
, 
Masayuki Ogawa
2
 and Tatsuo Sato
2
 
1
Niigata Institute of Technology, 1719 Fujihashi, Kashiwazaki, Niigata 945-1195, Japan 
2
Flowserve Japan Co.,Ltd. 1-32 Shinbashi, Kashiwazaki, Niigata 945-0056, Japan 
Keywords:  Fuzzy Measure, Fuzzy Integral, Fault Diagnosis, Vibration Diagnosis. 
Abstract:  This paper proposes an identification method of fuzzy measure for fault diagnosis of rotating machineries 
using vibration spectra method. The membership degrees for spectra in fuzzy set composed of vibration 
spectra are obtained from the optimized membership functions. The fuzzy measure is identified by the 
proposed method using the partial correlation coefficients between two spectra and the weight of each 
spectrum given by skilled engineers. The possibility of faults are determined by the fuzzy integral that is made 
by using the membership degrees and fuzzy measures for spectra. This paper also evaluates the method using 
field data. 
1 INTRODUCTION 
Diagnosis of faults in rotating machineries are made 
by applying prior knowledge in conjunction with 
diagnostic analysis techniques of diagnosing 
engineers. The need for diagnosing rotating 
machineries is rising due to the increased use of 
them in highly reliable systems such as aircrafts and 
nuclear power plants. Moreover, due to the increase 
of condition based maintenance (CBM) for highly 
dependable systems and for cost effective 
maintenance, many highly skilled engineers are 
required to make accurate diagnoses (Chen et al., 
2002). However, it is difficult to satisfy the current 
need of skilled engineers because the requisite 
training is lengthy and very expensive.  
Several diagnostic systems for rotating 
machineries have been developed to satisfy this need 
(Liu et al., 2007). Some of them use fuzzy measures 
and fuzzy integrals to encompass the existing 
knowledge of skilled engineers (Marinai and Singh, 
2006). However, they still have several problems, 
such as difficulty in isolating faults generating 
similar vibration spectra.  
This paper proposes an identification method of 
fuzzy measures using partial correlation coefficients 
of spectra used for fault diagnosis. The possibility of 
faults is determined by the fuzzy integral using the 
membership degree of spectra and fuzzy measure of 
the set of spectra. The membership degrees are 
obtained by the optimized membership functions 
(Tsunoyama et al., 2010; Tsunoyama et al, 2012), 
and fuzzy measures are identified by the  partial 
correlation coefficients of spectra and the weight of 
each spectrum given by skilled engineers. 
This paper is organized as follows. The vibration 
spectra for faults, and fuzzy measure and fuzzy 
integral are described in Section 2. The 
identification method of fuzzy measure and variation 
of possibility are explained in Section 3. A sample 
diagnosis and evaluation of the proposed method are 
provided in Section 4. Our conclusions are presented 
in Section 5. 
2 FAULT DIAGNOSIS 
OF ROTATING MACHINERIES 
2.1  Faults and Vibration Spectra 
Several kinds of faults occur in rotating machineries 
including abnormal vibration, oil or water leaks, and 
abnormal temperature. The proposed method 
diagnoses faults that produce abnormal vibration 
since a large number of faults in rotating 
machineries are accompanied by vibration. 
However, the presence of vibration is not necessarily 
indicative of a failure mode when the vibration 
power is low. The power level required for 
machinery failure is specified by ISO 2372. The 
273
Tsunoyama M., Imai Y., Hori H., Jinno H., Ogawa M. and Sato T..
Identification of Fuzzy Measures for Machinery Fault Diagnosis.
DOI: 10.5220/0004629202730278
In Proceedings of the 5th International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (FCTA-2013), pages 273-278
ISBN: 978-989-8565-77-8
Copyright
c
 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)