Tribology Letters 5 (1998) 249257 249

Automatic wear-particle classication using neural networks

Z. Peng and T.B. Kirk
Department of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, The University of Western Australia, Nedlands, WA 6907, Australia
Received 28 February 1998; accepted 27 June 1998
Although the study of wear debris can yield much information on the wear processes operating in machinery, the method has not been
widely applied in industry. The main reason is that the technique is currently time consuming and costly due to the lack of automatic
wear particle analysis and identication techniques. In this paper, six common types of metallic wear particles have been investigated
by studying three-dimensional images obtained from laser scanning confocal microscopy. Using selected numerical parameters, which
can characterise boundary morphology and surface topology of the wear particles, two neural network systems, i.e., a fuzzy Kohonen
neural network and a multi-layer perceptron with backpropagation learning rule, have been trained to classify the wear particles. The
study has shown that neural networks have the potential for dealing with classication tasks and can perform wear-particle classication
satisfactorily.
Keywords: wear-particle analysis, wear-debris classication, machine condition monitoring, fuzzy Kohonen neural network, multi-layer
perceptron
1. Introduction
Wear-particle analysis has been recognised as one of the
most effective means of machine condition monitoring be-
cause the morphology of wear debris is closely related to
the condition of loading, lubrication and wear processes in-
volving in a system. The technique, however, is still greatly
limited in industrial applications due to certain unresolved
issues associated with the study of wear particles. The main
obstacles in the study are: (1) the difculty to obtain suit-
able images of wear particles for analysis, and the lack of
effective parameters to describe the proper features of wear
debris; (2) the lack of automatic wear-particle classication
systems, which can perform wear-particle classication ef-
ciently and automatically, for industrial applications.
Wear particles are actually three-dimensional (3D) ob-
jects, containing both boundary morphology (such as size,
size distribution and the features of boundary proles) and
surface topology (e.g., surface roughness and texture char-
acterisations). To describe the characteristics of wear debris
effectively, it is rst necessary to obtain reliable images of
wear particles, and then, to develop effective descriptors to
characterise the appropriate features of those images [2].
So far, few imaging systems can provide three-dimensional
structures of objects directly. Laser scanning confocal mi-
croscopy (LSCM) is a rapidly developing system having
the ability to acquire three-dimensional images with an ade-
quate resolution. In this study, it has been further developed
and used to scan the images of metallic wear particles [3,4].
It has been veried that both the boundary morphology and
surface topography of wear particles can be examined by
analysing the images obtained from the LSCM [35].
The next step in the study of wear debris is to describe
the features of the boundary and surface topology of wear
particles reliably and effectively. As a result of the limita-
tions of most commonly used imaging techniques, wear de-
bris have been mainly studied in two dimensions (2D) [8,9].
It has been found that 2D wear-particle analysis may iden-
tify some types of wear particles, such as particles which
have well-dened boundary proles. However, it is dif-
cult to separate laminar, fatigue-chunk and severe-sliding-
wear debris from each other because the major differences
between them are apparent in their surface topology. To
study wear debris thoroughly, both boundary morphology
and surface topology have been investigated in this study.
Furthermore, the appropriate parameters have been devel-
oped [5,10]. All these efforts aim to build the foundation
for developing an automatic wear-particle classication sys-
tem.
The development of automatic wear-particle classica-
tion systems is another important step in the study of wear
particles, especially for identifying wear particles. Ap-
plication of such systems should signicantly reduce the
inspection time and the requirements for the inspectors
expertise [11,12]. Nowadays, neural networks have been
identied as a promising intellectual technique for solving
a large range of complex problems [13,14]. Meanwhile,
the pattern recognition area is a commonly studied topic in
neural networks. Therefore, many different architectures of
neural networks are available to handle this task with the
recent advances in learning techniques of neural networks.
In this study, two widely used neural networks have been
applied in classifying wear particles. A Kohonen neural
network [15,16] with fuzzy logic [17] has been rst chosen
and used to classify wear particles because the Kohonen
self-organising algorithms have a close relationship to the
eld of pattern recognition known as cluster analysis. As
the classication task is not exactly the same as the cluster
J.C. Baltzer AG, Science Publishers
250 Z. Peng, T.B. Kirk / Automatic wear-particle classication
analysis, which is normally an unsupervised process, the
used Kohonen neural networks do have certain drawbacks
when solving classication problems. Thus, the multi-layer
perceptron with learning capability [1820] has also been
trained to perform the classication task for comparison.
The details of training, testing and comparing these two
neural networks are presented in the following sections.
2. The three-dimensional study of metallic wear debris
2.1. Six types of metallic wear debris
The main issue in wear debris analysis is to thoroughly
describe the characteristics of the shape, size, surface
roughness and texture of wear debris using a few numerical
features. Before conducting the image analysis, obtaining
reliable images of wear particles for both boundary and
surface study is always crucial for the whole procedure.
To obtain wear particles for the study, gearbox and bear-
ing tests [4] have been conducted to produce ve common
types of wear debris, i.e, rubbing, cutting, laminar, fatigue-
chunk and severe-sliding-wear particles. A total of six of
the most common types of wear debris, which include the
above ve types and spherical particles
1
, will be studied in
this paper. The reason why these six types of wear particles
have been chosen for this study is because they have been
widely accepted as the most common types of wear parti-
cles [6]. Meanwhile, the presence of these wear particles
in lubricants usually has a direct relationship with the wear
modes and machine condition.
Rubbing particles have been recognised as normal wear
debris generated from a normal sliding-wear process. These
thin and small akes are often the broken parts of a unique
layer formed at a smooth slowly wearing surface. They
have similar sharp proles to laminar particles, but in much
smaller sizes. Fatigue chunk particles are believed to re-
sult from the high stresses imposed by repeatedly loading
and unloading. They are formed when the material is re-
moved as a pit or spall opened up with the growth of cracks.
Fatigue-chunk debris usually have a smooth surface on the
loading side and rough surfaces in the three perpendicu-
lar dimensions [6]. Severe sliding particles are associated
with excessive wear and surface stresses due to load and/or
speed. The parallel grooves or scratches on their surfaces
and straight edges make them identiable. Cutting parti-
cles are usually as a result of one hard surface penetrating
another softer surface. There are two ways to generate
cutting particles. One is that a hard component becomes
misaligned, resulting in a sharp edge ploughing a softer
surface. The other source is the three-body abrasion wear
process, which means there are hard abrasive particles in
the lubrication system. Spherical wear particles are usually
generated in the bearing fatigue cracks from rolling bear-
ing fatigue. These particles resemble small balls. Rolling-
1
Note: since it is not easy to generate spherical particles from the test,
man-made spheres are used in this study.
bearing fatigue is not the only source of spherical parti-
cles [1]. It is believed that cavitation erosion, welding or
grinding processes generate spherical wear particles as well.
It is also found that these particles are generated from se-
vere friction, and are associated with high temperatures.
In short, different types of wear particles have their distin-
guishable generation mechanisms. Accordingly, identifying
individual wear particles can help analysts and engineers to
understand the wear mode, and furthermore, to examine the
condition of a machine.
After the wear particles are separated from the oil sam-
ples using the ltergram method [7], a laser scanning confo-
cal microscope (LSCM) with a transmission sensor [4] has
been applied to acquiring 3D images of the wear debris.
Consequently, the wear particles have been studied and at-
tempted to classify into six types, i.e., rubbing, cutting,
spherical, laminar, fatigue-chunk and severe-sliding-wear
particles.
2.2. The study of boundary morphology
Based on the features of different types of wear parti-
cles, boundary morphology can be categorised according
to the attributes of outline shapes, edge details and size
distributions. Normally, the area and length in the major
dimension are parameters to describe size distributions of
wear debris; while roundness and the bre ratio [35] (see
the denitions in the note of table 1) can characterise the
features of boundary proles such as regular or irregular
and circular or elongated outlines. Using the above numer-
ical parameters, cutting debris and spherical particles can
be distinguished from other types of wear particles by their
well-dened boundary characterisations. Rubbing debris
are usually a platelet with a smooth surface, and resemble
small-scaled laminar particles. By studying the different
size distributions, this kind of wear particle can be sepa-
rated from laminar, fatigue-chunk and severe-sliding-wear
particles, as rubbing wear particles generally have a smaller
area and size in major dimension than do the others. Rub-
bing particles can also be identied from cutting particles
and spherical wear particles in the image analysis by com-
paring the values of the bre ratio and roundness, respec-
tively. Thus, the used boundary parameters can separate
rubbing, spherical and cutting particles from other types of
debris.
The identication of laminar, fatigue-chunk and severe-
sliding-wear particles is usually more complicated than that
of rubbing, cutting and spherical particles because the for-
mer three debris may have various boundary proles. In or-
der to identify those particles, the height aspect ratio (HAR:
major length to thickness) [4,5] has been chosen to describe
the volume contours of wear particles in three dimensions.
Fatigue-chunk debris generated from fatigue spalls, pitting
and breaking up from rolling contact fatigue, usually have
larger values of HAR than do laminar particles. HAR,
however, is difcult to assess accurately and cannot always
identify fatigue-chunk debris from laminar particles due to
Z. Peng, T.B. Kirk / Automatic wear-particle classication 251
Table 1
Analysis results of wear particles.
Parameter
a
Types of wear particles
Rubbing Cutting Spherical Laminar Fatigue chunk Severe sliding
Area (m
2
) 38 230 659 2129 895 652
Length (m) 9 40 14 58 39 41
Roundness 0.52 0.13 0.89 0.63 0.53 0.46
Fibre ratio 1.46 13.53 0.84 3.18 2.48 2.97
Fractal dimension 1.095 1.045 1.038
HAR 0.103 0.332 0.174
Ra (m) 0.819 1.405 0.809
Rq (m) 1.024 1.756 1.011

2
0.535 0.556 0.265
a
Area: area measurements of wear particles.
Length: length in the major dimension.
Roundness (4(area)/(length)
2
): it is sensitive to the elongation of a boundary prole. The roundness is equal
to 1 for a circle and is less for any other shape.
Fibre ratio: it is approximately equal to the length of a bre along its axis divided by its width. Fibre ratio is
aspect ratio (length/width) if the center point is in the contour of a image.
Fractal dimension: numerical parameter used for characterisation of a boundary prole or curve. D = 1
dx/dy, where dx/dy is the gradient of a double log plot of dilation radius and perimeter.
HAR (height aspect ratio): the height of a particle compared to its maximal planar dimension.
Ra: average roughness of a surface, Ra =
1
n

n
1
|z
i
|, where n is the number of sampling points and Z is the
residual surface.
Rq: root mean square of Ra, Rq = (
1
n

n
1
z
2
i
)
1/2
.

2
: the spectral moment analysis is a quantitative descriptor which can indicate the texture pattern.
the deformation of wear particles and different particle sur-
face orientations toward the microscope.
The boundary fractal dimension [5], therefore, is applied
to studying those wear particles because it can assess the
ruggedness of the edge features of wear particles. Although
the boundary fractal dimension can be used to assess the
general features of the different boundary morphologies of
the above particles, there is still overlap between the mea-
surements for laminar, fatigue-chunk and severe-sliding de-
bris. This is because individual particles may vary in prole
even though they belong to the same type, and also because
noise can affect the effectiveness of the boundary fractal di-
mension. Studies [4,5] have veried that analysing laminar,
fatigue-chunk and severe-sliding debris by studying only
the features of their boundary morphology is insufcient to
adequately classify them.
2.3. The study of surface topology
Surface analysis, which includes the study of surface
roughnesses and textures, is another important component
part in wear-particle analysis. R
a
and R
q
[35], which
are the arithmetic mean height and the root-mean-square
value of surface departure within the sampling area, respec-
tively, are commonly used surface parameters to describe
the height and amplitude distributions of wear particle sur-
faces. These two descriptors may identify smooth surfaces
from rough ones, but R
a
and R
q
only measure the aver-
age deviation of a surface prole in the vertical direction.
They are not scale-independent parameters, which means
the measurement does rely on the scale length. Moreover,
R
a
and R
q
do not carry any information about slopes, sizes
of asperities and frequencies of their occurrence, so widely
different surfaces can give similar values of R
a
and R
q
.
Since the conventional parameters cannot describe the fea-
tures of striations on a surface, other parameters have to be
developed to study surface textures of wear particles. This
is important because the surface texture is an also very im-
portant characteristic of wear particles, and it is crucial to
identify severe sliding particles from other types of debris.
It has been shown that two-dimensional fast Fourier
transform [21] and co-occurrence matrix [22] are effec-
tive methods for investigating surface patterns, i.e., isotropy
and anisotropy. The two-dimensional fast Fourier trans-
form, power spectrum and angular spectrum have been ap-
plied to studying surface textures of wear debris in this
series of studies [5,10]. The previous investigations have
shown that the techniques are able to separate isotropy from
anisotropy, and moreover, can describe different severities
of anisotropic surfaces consistently with visual perception.
Spectral moment analysis (
2
) [21] is a quantitative de-
scriptor which can indicate the texture pattern. A previous
study [5] has veried that
2
is effective in describing dif-
ferent surface textures of wear particles.
2.4. The combination features of wear particles
Wear particles are three-dimensional objects, so neither
the study of boundary morphology nor the analysis of sur-
face topography can fully describe the features of six types
of metallic wear debris. The identication should rely on
both boundary and surface analysis. Table 1 shows the
criteria for characterising those wear particles and the av-
erage values of the parameters. The gures displayed in
252 Z. Peng, T.B. Kirk / Automatic wear-particle classication
this table are the average values of all descriptors extracted
from more than 50 wear particles of each type. The de-
scriptors and the values are also the centroids of six types
of wear debris, which will be used as references to train
neural networks.
3. Neural networks for wear-particle classication
Although conventional computers possess tremendous
performance capabilities in many areas, they are subject
to deciencies when they come to the tasks which humans
are able to deal with effortlessly perception and learn-
ing. To make computers perform similar tasks to human
beings, neural networks have been developed to emulate
brain cell complexes in order to attain a viable simula-
tion of complex human thought processes. Neural net-
works [13,14] are comprised of many simple computing
elements and are models of the brains functional processes.
Pattern recognition and classication are common issues in
daily life, which usually require inspection by experts, and
experience. The wear-particle classication process is such
an example. Normally, it is a time-consuming procedure
as regards the requirement of considerable experience in
analysing the particle morphology, and accordingly, decid-
ing which type(s) it belongs to. Presently, with the rapid
development of neural networks, it has been known that
neural networks, such as Kohonen neural networks and the
multi-layer perceptron with the learning rule, can cope with
these kinds of real world problems satisfactorily.
3.1. Fuzzy Kohonen neural networks
Kohonen clustering networks (KCNs) belong to the most
widely used unsupervised schemes which can nd the best
set of weights for hard clusters and classes in an itera-
tive and sequential manner. The structure of KCN consists
of two layers, i.e., input and output layer, shown in g-
ure 1. Here, X = {x
1
, x
2
, . . . , x
n
} are the input features
of unknown particles. Each output node has a prototype
or weight vector v
i,t
. The weight vector is adjusted during
learning according to the following update rule:
v
i,t
= v
i,t
+
ik,t
(x
k
v
i,t1
),
where is learning rate. Given a set of input vectors, the
neurones in the output layer compete among themselves.
Consequentially, the winner, whose weight has the min-
imum distance from the input, updates its weights. The
process stops when all weight vectors stabilise.
Kohonen neural networks have several problems when
they are used to deal with classication tasks. The major
problem is that KCNs are heuristic procedures, and there-
fore, the termination is not based on optimising any model
of the process or its data. To remedy this, fuzzy logic
has been introduced in KCN. It is believed that the inte-
gration of fuzzy c-means algorithms (FCM) and KCN is
one solution to address this drawback. In addition, KCN
Figure 1. Architecture of a fuzzy Kohonen neural network.
clustering is closely related to FCM, and FCM algorithms
are optimisation procedures [17]. Bezdek and Tsao [15]
have extended this idea to a new investigation called fuzzy
Kohonen clustering network (FKCN). The algorithm of the
FKCN is exhibited below [17]:
(1) Fix the number of types of classes c, || ||
A
and > 0
some small positive constant.
(2) Initialise v
0
= (v
1,0
, v
2,0
, . . . , v
c,0
) R
cp
. Choose m
0
>
1 and t
max
= iterate limit.
(3) For t = 1, 2, . . . , t
max
:
(a) compute
u
ik
=

||x
k
v
i
||
A
/||x
k
v
j
||
A

2/(m1)

1
,
v
i
=

(u
ik
)
m
x
k
/

(u
ik
)
m
,

ik,t
= (u
ik
)
mt
, m
t
= (m
0
1)/t
max
;
(b) update all (c) weight vectors {v
i,t
} with
v
i,t
= v
i,t
+

k=1

ik,t
(x
k
v
i,t1
)

s=1

is,t
;
(c) compute E
t
= ||v
t
v
t1
||
2
=

i
||v
i,t
v
i,t1
||
2
;
(d) if E
t
stop; else next t.
The procedure is divided into training, labelling and clas-
sication when a FKCN is applied to perform wear-particle
classication. In the rst stage, the network is trained by
using more than 150 examples which distribute evenly in
all classes. The neurones are then assigned to the names
of classes via the labelling process. After completion of
the labelling process, the classication phase has been per-
formed on around 200 new particles. The accuracy rate
of the fuzzy Kohonen neural network for six types of the
particles is displayed in table 2 with the conguration of
the FKCN shown in table 3.
It can be seen from table 2 that the classication result
of the FKCN has a relatively high error rate, especially for
rubbing, spherical and fatigue-chunk particles. The main
reason is due to the unsupervised algorithm of the network.
Since some wear particles are already known as certain
types, they are actually good examples to train neural net-
works. For this reason, a supervised neural network named
as the multi-layer perceptron with backpropagation learning
rule has been used to perform the classication task in this
study.
Z. Peng, T.B. Kirk / Automatic wear-particle classication 253
Table 2
Classication results in the neural networks.
Types of particles
Rubbing Spherical Cutting Laminar Fatigue chunk Severe sliding Average
FKCN (% accuracy) 62% 56% 93% 83% 60% 97% 75%
MLP (% accuracy) 99% 100% 98% 93% 92% 89% 95%
Table 3
The conguration of the FKCN.
Neurons of Neurons of Number of Exponent Exponent Training Convergence
the input layer the output layer features step initialization threshold
40 6 9 2 0.02 Random matrix 0.001
3.2. Multi-layer perceptron neural networks
Multi-layer perceptron (MLP) with backpropagation
learning rule is an entirely supervised neural network. The
multi-layer perceptron structure has provided a potential al-
ternative not only to traditional pattern recognition systems,
but also to common non-linear adaptive lters [19]. A MLP
is a widely used network due to three different aspects. The
rst is that it has the ability to implement Boolean logic
functions. The second potential is the ability to partition
the pattern space for classication problems, and the last
one is the ability to implement non-linear transformations
for functional approximation problems [20]. Here, a MLP
is used to perform an automatic classication task for wear
particles.
The MLP, shown in gure 2, usually consists of simple,
non-linear, and processing units arranged in several layers.
The rst layer (input layer) receives signals and propagates
them through the network to the last layer, which is also
denoted as the output layer. The individual perceptrons in
the network are called neurones or nodes. The connection
between different layers relies on nodes. Ordinarily, the
number of neurones in the input layer equals to the number
of parameters which are used to describe the characteristics
of wear debris. In this study, nine neurones are set for the
input layer. The multiple nodes in the output layer typically
correspond to multiple classes for the multi-class pattern
recognition problem. So the output layer (last layer) has a
total of six neurones for the six types of wear debris. The
hidden layer nodes help the MLP to solve the classication
problem by combining simple functional units.
A MLP is usually applied in three phases. In the rst
phase, the network is trained by learning from examples,
which are employed to adapt the connection weights be-
tween the neurones. As it is a supervised learning process,
the examples must contain the desired results. The train-
ing is achieved by mapping the effect of the weights onto
the error signal. As a result of the training procedure, the
global sum of the error between the actual output and the
desired output is minimised over the entire training set and
Figure 2. Architecture of a typical multi-layer perceptron.
all the output nodes. If the error energy is dened as [18]:
E =

1
N
N

i=1
( actual output desired output )
2

1/2
,
where N = number of output neurones. The algorithm
updates the weight at each training cycle by the following
formula:
W = W +W,
where W is a weight of a neuron input, and W =
E/W, is the learning rate. The training process
stops when the error energy E is small enough. Follow-
ing the training process is the test, which is to check if
the trained network meets the prevailing requirements. If it
does, the network can be applied for the actual classication
tasks (the third phase).
In this study, in order to decide upon the conguration
of a neural network for wear-particle classication, whose
features are characterised by nine criteria (see table 1), one
and two hidden layers with different number of neurones
for each layer have been tried. After experimentation, the
two-hidden-layer MLP with momentum learning method
[1820] has been chosen for this study. The learning rate
is 0.001 in the network, and the transfer functions are lin-
ear, taugh, sigmoid and sigmoid for the rst layer, the rst
and second hidden layer and the output layer, respectively.
254 Z. Peng, T.B. Kirk / Automatic wear-particle classication
Table 4
The congurations of the MLP.
Layers Input Hidden1 Hidden2 Ouput
Number of neurons 9 6 10 6
Transfer function Linear Taugh Sigmoid Sigmoid
Training data Format of data Scaled to [01]
Presentation order Random
Learning rate 0.001 0.9 1.0
Learning parameters Momentum 0.001 0.9 1.0
Decay rate 0.001 0.9 1.0
Learning method Backprop with momentum
Learning strategy Single step (delta)
RMS training error Less than 0.001
No. epochs Dividable by 10000
Table 5
Analysis results of the wear particles (shown in gure 3).
Parameter Wear particles (gure 3)
(a) (b) (c1) (d) (e) (f)
Area (m
2
) 38.37 83.92 616.68 268.96 669.21 439.93
Length (m) 9.61 27.86 14.57 25.23 37.55 39.48
Roundness 0.53 0.14 0.93 0.54 0.54 0.36
Fibre ratio 1.65 17.09 1.32 0.99 2.40 2.64
Fractal dimension 1.121 1.091 1.078 1.033 1.143 1.024
HAR 0.207 0.181 0.371 0.141 0.375
Ra (m) 0.444 0.620 * 1.411 0.747 1.694
Rq (m) 0.535 0.778 1.764 0.946 2.210

2
0.623 0.367 0.627 0.702 0.253
* The surface analysis of the sphere is voided because of the difculty to acquire information on the
surface.
Because the parameters for describing wear particles are
actually multi-dimensional features, all features have been
scaled to the range [01] before the training, testing and
classication. The details of the optimal conguration are
shown in table 4.
More than 200 examples have been used to train the
MLP with almost uniform distribution for six types. The
nal accuracy rate of the classication is shown in table 2.
It is shown, from table 2, that the accuracy rate of the
MLP is much higher than that of the fuzzy Kohonen neural
network. This is due to the different algorithms of those
two kinds of neural networks. It has been veried that the
MLP, which has a supervised learning algorithm, is more
exible in learning from examples. Therefore, it appears to
be more suitable to perform the classication task for wear
particles.
4. Classication examples
Figures 3 (a)(f) show LSCM images of six wear parti-
cles generated from the gearbox and bearing tests. Those
particles are represented as test examples for both the fuzzy
Kohonen neural network and the multi-layer perceptron.
The boundary morphology analyses have been performed
on the particle boundaries provided by the maximum bright-
ness images, while surface analyses have been conducted
on the height-encoded images of those particles [5] (which
are not demonstrated in this paper). The brief denitions of
the maximum brightness image and the height-encoded im-
age are as follows: the maximum brightness image records
the maximum pixel value for each xy location from all the
images in the stack; the height-encoded image contains the
information on the image level which the maximum pixel
comes from. It is necessary to clarify that the images dis-
played in gure 3(c) are only the proles of spheres due to
the difculty to obtain completely surface information from
this kind of particle. The analysis results of gures 3(a)(f)
are shown in table 5.
After the FKCN and the MLP were trained and tested,
the above six particles have been classied using the FKCN
and the MLP individually. The classication results of
those neural networks are presented in tables 6 and 7, re-
spectively.
The classication results from both the FKCN and the
MLP show that gures 3(a), (b) and (c1) are rubbing, cut-
ting and spherical particles respectively, this being consis-
tent with human inspection. Comparing the memberships
in tables 6 and 7, it is evident that the MLP has output
higher memberships for gure 3(a) to the type of rubbing
particles and gure 3(c1) to the spherical debris than do
the FKCN. As gures 3(a) and (c1) are actually a typi-
cal rubbing particle and spherical particle, respectively, the
Z. Peng, T.B. Kirk / Automatic wear-particle classication 255
(a) (b)
(c) (d)
(e) (f)
Figure 3. Images of wear particles obtained from laser scanning confocal microscopy for neural network classication test. Note: gure 3(c) are not
particles generated from normal wear process, but it can show the same characteristics of spherical particles.
256 Z. Peng, T.B. Kirk / Automatic wear-particle classication
Table 6
Classication results in the fuzzy Kohonen neural network.
Wear particle Membership of classication
(gure 3)
Rubbing Cutting Spherical Fatigue chunk Laminar Severe sliding
(a) 0.432 0.018 0.159 0.355 0.031 0.001
(b) 0.000 1.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000
(c1) 0.212 0.038 0.372 0.204 0.121 0.050
(d) 0.016 0.000 0.000 0.981 0.000 0.021
(e) 0.662 0.035 0.004 0.078 0.221 0.000
(f) 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 1.000
Table 7
Classication results in the multi-layer perceptron.
Wear particle Membership of classication
(gure 3)
Rubbing Cutting Spherical Fatigue chunk Laminar Severe sliding
(a) 0.995 0.001 0.000 0.001 0.009 0.000
(b) 0.002 0.989 0.000 0.000 0.001 0.003
(c1) 0.000 0.000 0.992 0.001 0.001 0.000
(d) 0.008 0.000 0.004 0.986 0.006 0.021
(e) 0.007 0.010 0.001 0.065 0.843 0.002
(f) 0.001 0.002 0.000 0.020 0.000 0.958
classication result of the multi-layer perceptron is more re-
liable and reasonable for these two test particles. Both the
FKCN and the MLP have classied gure 3(d) as a fatigue-
chunk particle with the membership being greater than 0.9.
For the particle shown in gure 3(e), the classication re-
sult of the FKCN is a rubbing particle, while the MLP has
classied it as a laminar particle. Since laminar particles
have similar boundary morphology and surface topography
to that of rubbing wear debris but in the different range of
size, the size features in table 5 have demonstrated that the
particle in gure 3(e) is a laminar particle. So the MLP has
given a correct classication of gure 3(e). The last exam-
ple displayed in gure 3(f) is a particle with scratches on
the surface. The FKCN and the MLP identify this particle
as a severe-sliding-wear particle concurrently.
Studying the six examples in gure 3, it has been indi-
cated that the multi-layer perceptron can handle the wear-
particle classication task satisfactorily. Moreover, the per-
formance of the MLP is much better than that of the FKCN
in wear-particle identication. The test has veried that the
trained MLP is ready for performing wear-particle classi-
cation tasks.
5. Discussion
The study has further conrmed that three-dimensional
image analysis of wear particles is necessary for examin-
ing the distinguishable characteristics and identifying the
six types of wear debris. Comparing the average values of
the six types of wear particles in table 1 and six examples
in table 5, it is clear that studying boundary morphology
is sufcient to distinguish rubbing, cutting and spherical
particles. Since laminar, fatigue-chunk and severe-sliding-
wear particles may have similar size distributions, and their
shape features are not so distinguishable, it is not easy to
separate these wear debris by analysing only their shape
and size features. It has been veried in the series stud-
ies that three-dimensional analysis, combining the study of
boundary morphology and surface topology, is an effective
and reliable method for investigating these wear debris.
This paper is the investigation of developing an auto-
matic wear particle analysis and classication system. To
fully develop such a system for industrial applications, more
work needs to be done. It may include the development
of an automatic image acquiring system, which can per-
form 3D imaging without or with far less human involve-
ment. In addition, more information, related to the issue
of machine condition monitoring, needs to be added in the
system. They may include the corresponding wear mecha-
nisms, possible machine condition related to the identied
types of wear debris, and the suggested maintenance proce-
dures based on the detected condition of a machine. As a
result, the detected machine condition and possible mainte-
nance suggestions can be output as references for engineers.
Besides these, other types of wear particles may need to be
studied and added to the system if it is necessary.
6. Conclusions
Two widely used neural networks, i.e., the fuzzy Ko-
honen neural network and the multi-layer perceptron with
backpropagation learning rule, have been explored to clas-
sify six types of wear particles using numerical descriptors.
This study has shown that both of those neural networks can
generally capture the characteristics of those wear particles
once trained using the given examples. Thereafter, they can
perform automatic wear-particle classication tasks. Since
Z. Peng, T.B. Kirk / Automatic wear-particle classication 257
the multi-layer perceptron has ability to learn from exam-
ples exibly in a supervised manner, the performance ac-
curacy is much higher than the fuzzy Konohen neural net-
work. It has been veried in this investigation that the
MLP is potential of classifying wear particles after the
suitable congurations of the neural network are decided,
and enough and reliable learning examples are presented
to the training process. This study is a further investi-
gation of developing automatic wear-particle classication
techniques using neural networks for machine condition
monitoring. Meanwhile, the research has demonstrated the
neural network classication system can produce reason-
able results for wear-debris identication.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution
of Mr. Franz Detro from Management Intelligenter Tech-
nologien GmbH, Germany for his valuable discussion and
suggestion on deciding the suitable congurations of neural
networks for wear-particle classication.
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