Digital Necropsy: Using AI to Autopsy Failed Components – LubeExpo Europe 2025

Description

Traditional root cause analysis (RCA) has long depended on physical inspection, oil analysis, and historical maintenance records to diagnose why a component failed. While effective, these methods are often reactive, siloed, and subject to interpretation biases. As industrial assets become increasingly instrumented, the opportunity exists to merge conventional forensic techniques with artificial intelligence (AI), creating a “digital necropsy” process. This approach integrates historical sensor data, lubrication analysis, and visual evidence into an AI-assisted framework capable of reconstructing failure timelines, identifying probable causes, and recommending preventive measures before similar failures occur. This paper outlines the methodology, required datasets, benefits, and practical limits of AI-driven component post-mortems.