A TECHNIQUE FOR THE CALCULATION OF THE LOCATION OF A VIBRATION SOURCE

A study was undertaken to assess the feasibility of identifying the lo cation of a point of excitation acting on an elastic structure based o n information obtained from remote transducers. This process was deeme d significant as the technique would have applications in identifying machinery in a large, complex plant that was producing spurious forcin g conditions, for example out-of-balance or shaft misalignment. A patt ern recognition strategy was adopted using the Kohonen network. The Ko honen array was subsequently labelled using both multi-layer perceptro ns and Gaussian labelling. The former was found to be computationally inefficient and hence the latter is implemented. It was found that usi ng the system described it is possible to identify a single frequency source of vibration.