Traffic accidents occurred frequently everyday throughout the world. The accidents are mainly caused by car components malfunctioning and human negligence. The malfunctioning can be prevented if the condition of the components, such as engine, are well monitored with diagnostic report. Currently most of the engine diagnostics are relied on the use of expensive pressure sensor and this type of sensor is complicated and intrusive to install. The OnStar system provided by General Motor does provide the diagnostics of the car, but the information are from the on board computer which would not provide detailed nature of the fault, particular on the combustion engine which comprised of numerous mechanical components. In view of this, a real time monitoring system coupled with engine diagnostics is proposed. The system relies on low-cost sensor compared to the traditional approach. In addition, the location of the monitoring vehicle can also be logged through the system and thus fleet management became feasible.
Slurry pump imparts energy to the abrasive and corrosive slurries by means of centrifugal force provided by the rotation of the impeller. The sudden breakdown of the pump may cause huge losses to the society which should be prevented by adequate monitoring. The current research on impeller are mainly concerned on improving the materials used rather than the degradation process. On the other hand, the degradation of the slurry pump is only studied based on the use of laboratory data which cannot represent the real degradation induced by the slurries. Few researches were accomplished with the in situ data, however, only one single dataset was used in which their developed method may not be convincing in accomplishing the task. In view of this, a set of in situ slurry pump vibration data with different components replacement maintenance were studied. A clearer cut-off frequency was re-defined. Methods were proposed to assess the remaining useful life of the pump. The overall framework from data acquisition, data analysis and remaining useful life prediction can be built into a system such that technical staffs can study and understand the condition of the pumps when they wanted to.