A new model for calculating time-varying gearmesh stiffness

Time-varying gearmesh stiffness (TVGS) is the main cause of gear vibration, and its accuracy affects the responses of dynamic models. An exponential curve model based on the Saint Venant’s Principle is proposed to calculate the gearmesh stiffness of cracked spur gears in this paper. With the proposed model, the TVGS under the circumstances of healthy condition and four crack cases are computed, whose results have a good agreement with those of finite element method (FEM). Therefore, the exponential curve model can be used to estimate the TVGS and an alternative to FEM in gearmesh stiffness calculation is provided

A Method Based on Multi-Sensor Data Fusion for Fault Detection of Planetary Gearboxes

Studies on fault detection and diagnosis of planetary gearboxes are quite limited compared with those of fixed-axis gearboxes. Different from fixed-axis gearboxes, planetary gearboxes exhibit unique behaviors, which invalidate fault diagnosis methods that work well for fixed-axis gearboxes. It is a fact that for systems as complex as planetary gearboxes, multiple sensors mounted on different locations provide complementary information on the health condition of the systems. On this basis, a fault detection method based on multi-sensor data fusion is introduced in this paper. In this method, two features developed for planetary gearboxes are used to characterize the gear health conditions, and an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) is utilized to fuse all features from different sensors. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, experiments are carried out on a planetary gearbox test rig, on which multiple accelerometers are mounted for data collection. The comparisons between the proposed method and the methods based on individual sensors show that the former achieves much higher accuracies in detecting planetary gearbox faults

Incipient Fault Detection for Rolling Element Bearings under Varying Speed Conditions

Varying speed conditions bring a huge challenge to incipient fault detection of rolling element bearings because both the change of speed and faults could lead to the amplitude fluctuation of vibration signals. Effective detection methods need to be developed to eliminate the influence of speed variation. This paper proposes an incipient fault detection method for bearings under varying speed conditions. Firstly, relative residual (RR) features are extracted, which are insensitive to the varying speed conditions and are able to reflect the degradation trend of bearings. Then, a health indicator named selected negative log-likelihood probability (SNLLP) is constructed to fuse a feature set including RR features and non-dimensional features. Finally, based on the constructed SNLLP health indicator, a novel alarm trigger mechanism is designed to detect the incipient fault. The proposed method is demonstrated using vibration signals from bearing tests and industrial wind turbines. The results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method for incipient fault detection of rolling element bearings under varying speed conditions

Early Fault Diagnosis of Bearings Using an Improved Spectral Kurtosis by Maximum Correlated Kurtosis Deconvolution

The early fault characteristics of rolling element bearings carried by vibration signals are quite weak because the signals are generally masked by heavy background noise. To extract the weak fault characteristics of bearings from the signals, an improved spectral kurtosis (SK) method is proposed based on maximum correlated kurtosis deconvolution (MCKD). The proposed method combines the ability of MCKD in indicating the periodic fault transients and the ability of SK in locating these transients in the frequency domain. A simulation signal overwhelmed by heavy noise is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The results show that MCKD is beneficial to clarify the periodic impulse components of the bearing signals, and the method is able to detect the resonant frequency band of the signal and extract its fault characteristic frequency. Through analyzing actual vibration signals collected from wind turbines and hot strip rolling mills, we confirm that by using the proposed method, it is possible to extract fault characteristics and diagnose early faults of rolling element bearings. Based on the comparisons with the SK method, it is verified that the proposed method is more suitable to diagnose early faults of rolling element bearings

Fault Diagnosis of Rotating Machinery Based on an Adaptive Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition

The vibration based signal processing technique is one of the principal tools for diagnosing faults of rotating machinery. Empirical mode decomposition (EMD), as a time-frequency analysis technique, has been widely used to process vibration signals of rotating machinery. But it has the shortcoming of mode mixing in decomposing signals. To overcome this shortcoming, ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) was proposed accordingly. EEMD is able to reduce the mode mixing to some extent. The performance of EEMD, however, depends on the parameters adopted in the EEMD algorithms. In most of the studies on EEMD, the parameters were selected artificially and subjectively. To solve the problem, a new adaptive ensemble empirical mode decomposition method is proposed in this paper. In the method, the sifting number is adaptively selected, and the amplitude of the added noise changes with the signal frequency components during the decomposition process. The simulation, the experimental and the application results demonstrate that the adaptive EEMD provides the improved results compared with the original EEMD in diagnosing rotating machinery

Tacholess Envelope Order Analysis and Its Application to Fault Detection of Rolling Element Bearings with Varying Speeds

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