Diagnosis of Combination Faults in a Planetary Gearbox using a Modulation Signal Bispectrum based Sideband Estimator

This paper presents a novel method for diagnosing combination faults in planetary gearboxes. Vibration signals measured on the gearbox housing exhibit complicated characteristics because of multiple modulations of concurrent excitation sources, signal paths and noise. To separate these modulations accurately, a modulation signal bispectrum based sideband estimator (MSB-SE) developed recently is used to achieve a sparse representation for the complicated signal contents, which allows effective enhancement of various sidebands for accurate diagnostic information. Applying the proposed method to diagnose an industrial planetary gearbox which coexists both bearing faults and gear faults shows that the different severities of the faults can be separated reliably under different load conditions, confirming the superior performance of this MSB-SE based diagnosis scheme

Misalignment diagnosis of a planetary gearbox based on vibration analysis

As a critical power transmission system, planetary gearbox is widely used in many industrial important machines such as wind turbines, aircraft turbine engines, helicopters. Early fault detection and diagnosis of the gearbox will help to prevent unexpected breakdowns of this important equip-ment. Misalignment is one of the major operating problems in the planetary gearbox which may be caused by inadequate system integration, variable operating conditions and differences of elastic deformations in the system. In this paper, the effect of varying degrees of installation misalignment of planetary gearbox are investigated based on vibration measurements using spectrum analysis and modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) analysis. It has shown that the misalignment can be diagnosed in the low frequency range in which the adverse effect due to co-occurrence of amplitude modula-tion and frequency modulation (AM-FM) effect is low compared with the components around meshing frequencies. Moreover, MSB produces a more accurate and reliable diagnosis in that it gives correct indication of the fault severity and location for all operating conditions. In contrast, spectrum can produce correct results for some of the operating conditions. Keywords: Planetary gearbox, Condition Monitoring, Misalignment, Modulation signal bispectrum

Gear wear process monitoring using acoustic signals

Airborne acoustic signals contain valuable information from machines and can be detected remotely for condition monitoring. However, the signal is often seriously contaminated by various noises from the environment as well as nearby machines. This paper presents an acoustic based method of monitoring a two stage helical gearbox, a common power transmission system used in various industries. A single microphone is employed to measure the acoustics of the gearbox under-going a run-to-failure test. To suppress the background noise and interferences from nearby ma-chines a modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) analysis is applied to the signal. It is shown that the analysis allows the meshing frequency components and the associated shaft modulating components to be captured more accurately to set up a clear monitoring trend to indicate the tooth wear of the gears under test. The results demonstrate that acoustic signals in conjunction with efficient signal processing methods provide an effective monitoring of the gear transmission process

Gear wear process monitoring using a sideband estimator based on modulation signal bispectrum

As one of the most common gear failure modes, tooth wear can produce nonlinear modulation sidebands in the vibration frequency spectrum. However, limited research has been reported in monitoring the gear wear based on vibration due to the lack of tools which can effectively extract the small sidebands. In order to accurately monitor gear wear progression in a timely fashion, this paper presents a gear wear condition monitoring approach based on vibration signal analysis using the modulation signal bispectrum-based sideband estimator (MSB-SE) method. The vibration signals are collected using a run-to-failure test of gearbox under an accelerated test process. MSB analysis was performed on the vibration signals to extract the sideband information. Using a combination of the peak value of MSB-SE and the coherence of MSB-SE, the overall information of gear transmission system can be obtained. Based on the amplitude of MSB-SE peaks, a dimensionless indicator is proposed to assess the effects of gear tooth wear. The results demonstrated that the proposed indicator can be used to accurately and reliably monitor gear tooth wear and evaluate the wear severity

A study of two bispectral features from envelope signals for bearing fault diagnosis

: To accurately detect and diagnose bearing faults, bispectral analysis has received more attention recently because of its unique property of noise reduction and nonlinearity extraction. Particularly this study investigates two typical bispectra: conventional bispectrum (CB) and modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) for suppressing noise influences in envelope signals and hence obtaining more accurate diagnostic features. The first component from the diagonal slice of CB results and that of the subdiagonal slices of MSB results are taken as the diagnostic features considering effective inclusion of information and easy of computations. Simulative and experimental studies show that both MSB and CB features result in good diagnostic performances but MSB may outperform CB slightly in that it shows smaller variance in attaining the feature and more sensitive to weak fault signatures. This merit of MSB may be due to that the MSB feature has more diagnostic information as it is the combination of first three harmonics, whereas the CB feature is combined from just the first two harmonics

Planetary gearbox condition monitoring based on modulation analysis

The epicycle gearbox or planetary gearbox (PG) is a central power transmission systems of important machines such as helicopters and wind turbines which are mission critical and high cost systems. Condition monitoring (CM) has been explored extensively in recent years to avoid any unexpected interruptions and severe accidences caused by faults PGs. Although, considerable advancements in CM techniques, there still existed significant deficiency such as insensitivity, false diagnosis and high costs in implementing such techniques in industries. To improve CM techniques, therefore, this thesis focuses on an investigation of advanced signal analysis techniques such as higher order spectra (HOS) in order to achieve full characterisation of the nonlinear modulation processes of PG dynamics and thereby develop accurate diagnostic techniques. The lumped mass model is established for modelling the dynamic behaviour of the PG under investigation, which allows the vibration behaviours to be understood for analysing different abnormalities such as tooth breakages and gear errors. This paves the way for subsequent data analytics and fault diagnostics using modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) that allows the vibration data to be examined through HOS, but it is significantly efficient in characterising the multiple and nonlinear modulations of PG dynamics alongside superior noise reduction performance. Different degrees of misalignments in the PG drive system has been investigated and successfully diagnosed using MSB analysis of vibration measurements.. Moreover, the investigation included detection of tooth breakage faults of different severities in both the sun and a planet gear. The tooth faults were diagnosed using the recently developed MSB through accurately representation and estimate of residual sidebands induced by these faults. Consequently, MSB analysis produces an accurate and reliable diagnosis in that it gives correct indication of the fault severity and location for wide operating conditions. Furthermore, these fault diagnosis practices allows the establishment of residual sideband analysis approach. These residual sidebands resulting from the out-of-phase superposition of vibration waves due to asymmetric, multiple meshing sources are much less influenced by gear errors than the in-phase sidebands due to faults or new occurrences of the symmetricity. MSB can provide an accurate characterisation of the residual sidebands and consequently produces consistent diagnosis as confirmed by both simulation and experiment

Enhanced information extraction from noisy vibration data for machinery fault detection and diagnosis

As key mechanical components, bearings and gearboxes are employed in most machines. To maintain efficient and safe operations in modern industries, their condition monitoring has received massive attention in recent years. This thesis focuses on the improvement of signal processing approaches to enhance the performance of vibration based monitoring techniques taking into account various data mechanisms and their associated periodic, impulsive, modulating, nonlinear coupling characteristics along with noise contamination. Through in-depth modelling, extensive simulations and experimental verifications upon different and combined faults that often occur in the bearings and gears of representative industrial gearbox systems, the thesis has made following main conclusions in acquiring accurate diagnostic information based on improved signal processing techniques: 1) Among a wide range of advanced approaches investigated, such as adaptive line enhancer (ALE), wavelet transforms, time synchronous averaging (TSA), Kurtogram analysis, and bispectrum representations, the modulation signal bispectrum based sideband estimator (MSB-SE) is regarded as the most powerful tool to enhance the periodic fault signatures as it has the unique property of simultaneous demodulation and noise reduction along with ease of implementation. 2) The proposed MSB-SE based robust detector can achieve optimal band selection and envelope spectrum analysis simultaneously and show more reliable results for bearing fault detection and diagnosis, compared with the popular Kurtogram analysis which highlights too much on localised impulses. 3) The proposed residual sideband analysis yields accurate and consistent diagnostic results of planetary gearboxes across wide operating conditions. This is because that the residual sidebands are much less influenced by inherent gear errors and can be enhanced by MSB analysis. 4) Combined faults in bearings and gears can be detected and separated by MSB analysis. To make the results more reliable, multiple slices of MSB-SE can be averaged to minimise redundant interferences and improve the diagnostic performance

Fault detection and diagnosis of a multistage helical gearbox using magnitude and phase information from vibration signals

Vibration generated by a gearbox carries a great deal of information regarding its health condition. This research aims primarily on the detection and diagnosis of tooth defects in a multistage gearbox based on advanced vibration analysis. Time synchronised averaging (TSA) analysis is effective at removing noise but it is inefficient in implementation and in diagnosing different types of faults such as bearing defects other than gears. Conventional bispectrum (CB) can eliminate Gaussian noise while it preserves the signal’s phase information, however its overpopulated contents can still provide inaccurate information regarding to different types of gear faults. Recently developed modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) has the high potential to lead to the high accuracy of diagnostics of gearboxes as it more effectively characterises modulation signals such as gearbox vibrations. Therefore, the research takes MSB as the fundamental tool for analysing gearbox vibration signals and developing accurate diagnostic techniques. Firstly, it has realised that conventional techniques often ignore the effect of phase information in gearbox diagnostics. This thesis then focuses on developing CB and MSB based techniques for detecting and diagnosing of gearbox faults. Secondly, it has found that vibration responses from a multiple stage gearbox have high interferences between amplitude modulation (AM) and phase modulation (PM) which can be formalised from both gear faults and inherent manufacturing errors. However, the faults can induce wider bandwidth vibrations. Correspondingly, optimal component based schemes are also developed based on the use of MSB coherence results. Then the proposed MSB method allows an effective gearbox diagnosis using the signals in a narrower frequency band that is below twice the rotational frequency plus the highest meshing frequency amongst different gear transmission stages, being more suitable for wireless network condition monitoring systems. It has also found that the signals at resonance frequencies has a higher signal-to-noise ratio and more effective for obtaining accurate diagnosis. Also software encoder based TSA was found to be not robust and accurate due to the influences of noise and referencing components on obtaining a reliable phase signal for implementing TSA. Finally, the diagnostics carried out upon different fault cases using both CB and MSB have verified the proposed approaches can provide accurate diagnostic results, and with the new MSB based detector and estimator being more effective in differentiating between diffident fault locations for two local and one non-uniformly distributed tooth damages in a two stage helical gearbox

Requirements for Sensor Integrating Machine Elements : A Review of Wear and Vibration Characteristics of Gears

For condition monitoring of machines sensor integrating standard machine elements provide advantage in acquiring high-quality, robust data from individual machine elements and reducing effort in signal processing. However, research covering small and inexpensive consumer-grade MEMS sensors with respect to integration and measurement requirements for wear detection is limited. In order to define such requirements, the state of the art of vibration-based condition monitoring of gears is reviewed and summarised. The focus is on the characteristics of progressive wear and how it might show in the vibration signal. The review finds that correlation between wear and vibration characteristics of gears exist, but the interpretation of the vibration signals is challenging and requires purpose-built signal processing methods. The review also concludes that integrated MEMS acceleration sensors are theoretically able to measure the vibration characteristics of gears to detect wear. Important characteristics are the gear mesh acceleration with its frequencies and harmonic multiples (GMFi). Frequency range requirements for the sensors depend on the operating conditions of gears, the upper frequency limit needs to be greater or equal to 1.3 GMF$_{i,max}$. For the measuring range requirements, upper limits of 20 g RMS can be extracted within certain conditions. Data analysis requires a minimum frequency resolution which affects the size of memory needed for an integrated sensor system. However, there is a lack of research whether the sensitivity and internal noise behaviour of available MEMS sensors is good enough to measure relative changes in the vibration signals caused by wear