Fault Detection of Gearbox from Inverter Signals Using Advanced Signal Processing Techniques

The gear faults are time-localized transient events so time-frequency analysis techniques (such as the Short-Time Fourier Transform, Wavelet Transform, motor current signature analysis) are widely used to deal with non-stationary and nonlinear signals. Newly developed signal processing techniques (such as empirical mode decomposition and Teager Kaiser Energy Operator) enabled the recognition of the vibration modes that coexist in the system, and to have a better understanding of the nature of the fault information contained in the vibration signal. However these methods require a lot of computational power so this paper presents a novel approach of gearbox fault detection using the inverter signals to monitor the load, rather than the motor current. The proposed technique could be used for continuous monitoring as well as on-line damage detection systems for gearbox maintenance

An Assessment on the Non-Invasive Methods for Condition Monitoring of Induction Motors

The ability to forecast motor mechanical faults at incipient stages is vital to reducing maintenance costs, operation downtime and safety hazards. This paper synthesized the progress in the research and development in condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of induction motors. The motor condition monitoring techniques are mainly classified into two categories that are invasive and non-invasive techniques. The invasive techniques are very basic, but they have some implementation difficulties and high cost. The non-invasive methods, namely MCSA, PVA and IPA, overcome the disadvantages associated to invasive methods. This book chapter reviews the various non-invasive condition monitoring methods for diagnosis of mechanical faults in induction motor and concludes that the instantaneous power analysis (IPA) and Park vector analysis (PVA) methods are best suitable for the diagnosis of small fault signatures associated to mechanical faults. Recommendations for the future research in these areas are also presented

Tacholess order tracking method for gearbox based on time-varying filter and energy centrobaric correction method

Under the premise that the instantaneous speed can be accurately measured or precise estimated, order tracking is considered to be a classical and effective technique for non-stationary vibration analysis of rotating machinery. The meshing frequency components of the vibration signal measured from complex gearbox system interfere with each other mutually. The energy centrobaric correction method exhibits exact instantaneous frequency estimation (IFE) ability under the interference, but is susceptible to strong noise. Combining with time-varying filter and energy centrobaric correction method, a tacholess order tracking technique for gear fault diagnosis under the rotating frequency multi-linear fluctuation is proposed. The time-varying filter is designed to filter the strong noise signal, and then IFE could be accurately calculated from the filtered signal by energy centrobaric correction method. The instantaneous phase of reference shaft based on the Vold-Kalman filter (VKF) is used for angular resampling of the original vibration signal. The results show that the shaft rotating speed could be accurately identified from extracted gear meshing components. The order spectrum obtained by the proposed method with tacholess is substantially the same as the order spectrum obtained by a tachometer. Simulation analysis and experimental results verify the advantages of proposed tacholess order tracking technology for monitoring and fault diagnosis of gearbox vibration under the condition of strong noise and large speed variation

Diagnostics of gear faults based on EMD and automatic selection of intrinsic mode functions

Signal processing is an important tool for diagnostics of mechanical systems. Many different techniques are available to process experimental signals, among others: FFT, wavelet transform, cepstrum, demodulation analysis, second order ciclostationarity analysis, etc. However, often hypothesis about data and computational efforts restrict the application of some techniques. In order to overcome these limitations, the empirical mode decomposition has been proposed. The outputs of this adaptive approach are the intrinsic mode functions that are treated with the Hilbert transform in order to obtain the Hilbert–Huang spectrum. Anyhow, the selection of the intrinsic mode functions used for the calculation of Hilbert–Huang spectrum is normally done on the basis of user’s experience. On the contrary, in the paper a merit index is introduced that allows the automatic selection of the intrinsic mode functions that should be used. The effectiveness of the improvement is proven by the result of the experimental tests presented and performed on a test-rig equipped with a spiral bevel gearbox, whose high contact ratio made difficult to diagnose also serious damages of the gears. This kind of gearbox is normally never employed for benchmarking diagnostics techniques. By using the merit index, the defective gearbox is always univocally identified, also considering transient operating conditions

Fault diagnosis of gears based on local mean decomposition combing with kurtosis

Local Mean Decomposition (LMD) is a new self-adaptive time frequency analysis method. In present paper, the effectiveness of LMD method to extract fault features of gears, which are multi-component amplitude modulation (AM) and frequency modulation (FM), is demonstrated. A series of tests on tooth wearing, breaking and spalling gears are conducted and analyzed by LMD. And the fault features extracted by LMD are compared with those obtained from conventional Hilbert transform (HT). Moreover, the gear faults are identified by kurtosis based on LMD decomposed signals. The results demonstrate that the scheme combining LMD method with kurtosis analysis is effective to extract the characteristics of fault gears and improve the accuracy of fault diagnosis of gears

Development of new fault detection methods for rotating machines (roller bearings)

Abstract Early fault diagnosis of roller bearings is extremely important for rotating machines, especially for high speed, automatic and precise machines. Many research efforts have been focused on fault diagnosis and detection of roller bearings, since they constitute one the most important elements of rotating machinery. In this study a combination method is proposed for early damage detection of roller bearing. Wavelet packet transform (WPT) is applied to the collected data for denoising and the resulting clean data are break-down into some elementary components called Intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) using Ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) method. The normalized energy of three first IMFs are used as input for Support vector machine (SVM) to recognize whether signals are sorting out from healthy or faulty bearings. Then, since there is no robust guide to determine amplitude of added noise in EEMD technique, a new Performance improved EEMD (PIEEMD) is proposed to determine the appropriate value of added noise. A novel feature extraction method is also proposed for detecting small size defect using Teager-Kaiser energy operator (TKEO). TKEO is applied to IMFs obtained to create new feature vectors as input data for one-class SVM. The results of applying the method to acceleration signals collected from an experimental bearing test rig demonstrated that the method can be successfully used for early damage detection of roller bearings. Most of the diagnostic methods that have been developed up to now can be applied for the case stationary working conditions only (constant speed and load). However, bearings often work at time-varying conditions such as wind turbine supporting bearings, mining excavator bearings, vehicles, robots and all processes with run-up and run-down transients. Damage identification for bearings working under non-stationary operating conditions, especially for early/small defects, requires the use of appropriate techniques, which are generally different from those used for the case of stationary conditions, in order to extract fault-sensitive features which are at the same time insensitive to operational condition variations. Some methods have been proposed for damage detection of bearings working under time-varying speed conditions. However, their application might increase the instrumentation cost because of providing a phase reference signal. Furthermore, some methods such as order tracking methods still can be applied when the speed variation is limited. In this study, a novel combined method based on cointegration is proposed for the development of fault features which are sensitive to the presence of defects while in the same time they are insensitive to changes in the operational conditions. It does not require any additional measurements and can identify defects even for considerable speed variations. The signals acquired during run-up condition are decomposed into IMFs using the performance improved EEMD method. Then, the cointegration method is applied to the intrinsic mode functions to extract stationary residuals. The feature vectors are created by applying the Teager-Kaiser energy operator to the obtained stationary residuals. Finally, the feature vectors of the healthy bearing signals are utilized to construct a separating hyperplane using one-class support vector machine. Eventually the proposed method was applied to vibration signals measured on an experimental bearing test rig. The results verified that the method can successfully distinguish between healthy and faulty bearings even if the shaft speed changes dramatically

Advances in Electrical Machine, Power Electronic, and Drive Condition Monitoring and Fault Detection: State of the Art

© 2015 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permissíon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisíng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] Recently, research concerning electrical machines and drives condition monitoring and fault diagnosis has experienced extraordinarily dynamic activity. The increasing importance of these energy conversion devices and their widespread use in uncountable applications have motivated significant research efforts. This paper presents an analysis of the state of the art in this field. The analyzed contributions were published in most relevant journals and magazines or presented in either specific conferences in the area or more broadly scoped events.Riera-Guasp, M.; Antonino-Daviu, J.; Capolino, G. (2015). Advances in Electrical Machine, Power Electronic, and Drive Condition Monitoring and Fault Detection: State of the Art. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics. 62(3):1746-1759. doi:10.1109/TIE.2014.2375853S1746175962

Frequency Demodulation-Aided Condition Monitoring for Drivetrain Gearboxes

Condition monitoring and fault diagnosis (CMFD) of drivetrain gearboxes has become a prominent challenge in assorted industries. Current-based diagnostic techniques have significant advantages over traditional vibration-based techniques in terms of accessibility, cost, implementation and reliability. This paper proposes a current-based, frequency demodulation-aided CMFD method for drivetrain gearboxes. A mathematical model is developed for a drivetrain consisting of a two-stage gearbox and a permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG), from which the characteristic frequencies of gearbox faults in the PMSG stator current are derived. An adaptive signal resampling method is proposed to convert the variable fault characteristic frequencies to constant values for the drivetrain running at variable speed conditions. A demodulation method, combining the Hilbert transform, a finite impulse response (FIR) differentiator, and a phase unwrapping algorithm, is developed to extract the instantaneous frequency (IF) patterns that are related to the faultinduced gearbox vibration. A fault detector is proposed for diagnosis of gearbox faults using statistical analysis on the extracted fault signatures. Experimental studies are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method