A time domain approach to diagnose gearbox fault based on measured vibration signals

Abstract Spectral analysis techniques to process vibration measurements have been widely studied to characterize the state of gearboxes. However, in practice, the modulated sidebands resulting from the local gear fault are often difficult to extract accurately from an ambiguous/blurred measured vibration spectrum due to the limited frequency resolution and small fluctuations in the operating speed of the machine that often occurs in an industrial environment. To address this issue, a new time-domain diagnostic algorithm is developed and presented herein for monitoring of gear faults, which shows an improved fault extraction capability from such measured vibration signals. This new time-domain fault detection method combines the fast dynamic time warping (Fast DTW) as well as the correlated kurtosis (CK) techniques to characterize the local gear fault, and identify the corresponding faulty gear and its position. Fast DTW is employed to extract the periodic impulse excitations caused from the faulty gear tooth using an estimated reference signal that has the same frequency as the nominal gear mesh harmonic and is built using vibration characteristics of the gearbox operation under presumed healthy conditions. This technique is beneficial in practical analysis to highlight sideband patterns in situations where data is often contaminated by process/measurement noises and small fluctuations in operating speeds that occur even at otherwise presumed steady-state conditions. The extracted signal is then resampled for subsequent diagnostic analysis using CK technique. CK takes advantages of the periodicity of the geared faults; it is used to identify the position of the local gear fault in the gearbox. Based on simulated gear vibration signals, the Fast DTW and CK based approach is shown to be useful for condition monitoring in both fixed axis as well as epicyclic gearboxes. Finally the effectiveness of the proposed method in fault detection of gears is validated using experimental signals from a planetary gearbox test rig. For fault detection in planetary gear-sets, a window function is introduced to account for the planet motion with respect to the fixed sensor, which is experimentally determined and is later employed for the estimation of reference signal used in Fast DTW algorithm.