Vibration separation technique based localized tooth fault detection of planetary gear sets: A tutorial

Abstract Due to the epicyclic motion of planet gears revolving around the sun gear in a planetary gear set, the vibration transfer paths between the gear-meshing positions and the outer ring gear mounted sensor are time-varying. This makes conventional localized gear faults detection approaches, such as the synchronous averaging and the narrowband demodulation, not usable for planetary gearboxes directly. The vibration separation technique was proposed more than 20 years ago to address the issue from the time-varying vibration transfer path, which allows further exploring the conventional gear faults detection approaches for the localized tooth fault detection of planetary gear sets. This tutorial is dedicated to study the vibration separation technique and showcase its application to the localized tooth fault detection of planetary gear sets. To guide readers’ understanding of the localized tooth fault detection of planetary gear sets comprehensively, the conventional gear fault detection methods, synchronous averaging and narrowband demodulation, are reviewed briefly at first. Subsequently, the features of planetary gear sets for vibration analysis are introduced. Furthermore, the conventional vibration separation technique is surveyed and an improvement on synthesizing the artificial gear vibration in the vibration separation is proposed. Then, a tooth-root crack detection scheme for planet and sun gears in a planetary gear set is designed by combining the vibration separation with the synchronous averaging and the narrowband demodulation. Experiments on a planetary gearbox test rig with the tooth-root crack of a planet gear and the sun gear have been carried out. The vibration analysis results demonstrate the effectiveness of the vibration separation technique for localized fault detection of planetary gear sets. It is hoped that this tutorial would provide a helpful reference for the readers in this field.

[1]  Ming J. Zuo,et al.  Vibration signal models for fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes , 2012 .

[2]  Shuangwen Sheng,et al.  Wind Turbine Gearbox Condition Monitoring Round Robin Study - Vibration Analysis , 2012 .

[3]  Zaigang Chen,et al.  Dynamic Features of a Planetary Gear System With Tooth Crack Under Different Sizes and Inclination Angles , 2013 .

[4]  Zhipeng Feng,et al.  Fault diagnosis of wind turbine planetary gearbox under nonstationary conditions via adaptive optimal kernel time–frequency analysis , 2014 .

[5]  P. D. McFadden,et al.  Detecting Fatigue Cracks in Gears by Amplitude and Phase Demodulation of the Meshing Vibration , 1986 .

[6]  P. S. Heyns,et al.  USING VIBRATION MONITORING FOR LOCAL FAULT DETECTION ON GEARS OPERATING UNDER FLUCTUATING LOAD CONDITIONS , 2002 .

[7]  Darryll J. Pines,et al.  Vibration separation methodology for planetary gear health monitoring , 2000, Smart Structures.

[8]  Robert B. Randall,et al.  Application of spectral kurtosis for detection of a tooth crack in the planetary gear of a wind turbine , 2009 .

[9]  Yimin Shao,et al.  Dynamic simulation of planetary gear with tooth root crack in ring gear , 2013 .

[10]  Ming J. Zuo,et al.  Fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes via torsional vibration signal analysis , 2013 .

[11]  Yu Guo.  Gear Fault Diagnosis Based on Narrowband Demodulation with Frequency Shift and Spectrum Edit , 2016 .

[12]  Yaguo Lei,et al.  Condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes: A review , 2014 .

[13]  Bongtae Han,et al.  Autocorrelation-based time synchronous averaging for condition monitoring of planetary gearboxes in wind turbines , 2016 .

[14]  K. R. Fyfe,et al.  ANALYSIS OF COMPUTED ORDER TRACKING , 1997 .

[15]  Liu Hong,et al.  A time domain approach to diagnose gearbox fault based on measured vibration signals , 2014 .

[16]  Simon Braun,et al.  The synchronous (time domain) average revisited , 2011 .

[17]  P. D. McFadden,et al.  A technique for calculating the time domain averages of the vibration of the individual planet gears and the sun gear in an epicyclic gearbox , 1991 .

[18]  P. D. McFadden,et al.  Window functions for the calculation of the time domain averages of the vibration of the individual planet gears and sun gear in an epicyclic gearbox , 1994 .

[19]  P. D. McFadden,et al.  A revised model for the extraction of periodic waveforms by time domain averaging , 1987 .

[20]  Ming J. Zuo,et al.  Planetary Gearbox Fault diagnosis via Joint Amplitude and Frequency Demodulation Analysis Based on Variational Mode Decomposition , 2017 .

[21]  Dong Han,et al.  Planetary gearbox fault diagnosis using an adaptive stochastic resonance method , 2013 .

[22]  Ahmet Kahraman,et al.  A theoretical and experimental investigation of modulation sidebands of planetary gear sets , 2009 .

[23]  Zhifang Zhu,et al.  Fault feature analysis of planetary gear system with tooth root crack and flexible ring gear rim , 2015 .

[24]  P. D. McFadden,et al.  APPLICATION OF SYNCHRONOUS AVERAGING TO VIBRATION MONITORING OF ROLLING ELEMENT BEARINGS , 2000 .