[308] Novel diagnosis of a reduced oil level in a gear motor via motor current non-linearity analysis
L Gelman1, M H Farhat1, G Conaghan2, W Kluis2 and A Ball1
1University of Huddersfield, UK
2Babcock BV, Holland
The lubricating oil level in industrial gearboxes must be monitored to ensure optimum performance and avoid damage to machine parts. Thus, it is proposed, investigated and validated by experiments in this paper, a diagnostic feature for a lack of lubrication detection in gearmotor systems based on motor current signature analysis. The proposed diagnostic feature is extracted, respectively, from the current signals of a three-phase induction gearmotor while different levels of oil removal are considered. The comparison of the feature values corresponding to each oil level has proven its effectiveness in diagnosing the oil level in the gearmotor.