[124] Monitoring of gear wear progressions based on a modulation signal bispectrum analysis of vibration
X Sun1,2, R Zhang2, K Lu2, A M Ahmaida1, F Gu1 and T Wang2 1Centre for Efficiency and Performance Engineering, University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield HD1 3DH, UK 2School of Mechanical Engineering, Taiyuan University of Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China
Gear tooth wear is a common fault mode that inevitably occurs in gear transmission system, which could result in many failures such as surface pitting, scuffing and tooth breakage. Moreover, the failures resulting from tooth wear may cause catastrophic economic loss and safety hazards. Therefore, condition monitoring of gear tooth wear is critically important to ensure the safe and reliable operation of gearbox systems. With decades of development, many methods have been applied to the condition monitoring of gear transmission systems, among which vibration analysis is the most widely used and generally accepted method due to its high reliability and the easy installation of sensors compared with other methods. Although vibration analysis has been developed over many decades, the techniques for gear wear monitoring have not been well established. In order to strengthen research in this respect, this study will conduct vibration-based condition monitoring of gear tooth wear based on a run-to-failure test. A modulation signal bispectrum (MSB)-based approach allows an accurate diagnostic feature to be extracted due to its significant performance in terms of noise suppression and sparse representation. Based on the run-to-failure data, it is shown that the MSB-based monitoring trend demonstrates better trending of the fault progression in terms of both diagnostic information completeness and computing efficiency, compared with well-known time synchronous averaging (TSA)-based approaches.
Keywords: vibration analysis, gear wear, MSB, TSA, condition monitoring.
