A study on the decoupling of helical gear compound uniform wear and tooth root crack faults via gear condition indicators based on dynamic modeling

Abstract

Diagnosis of compound faults plays a significant role in evaluating the health status of a gearbox. The difficulty of compound fault diagnosis is due to the entanglement of fault symptoms. In this work, diagnosis of single and compound uniform wear and tooth root crack via gear condition indicators have been studied analytically. A three-dimensional dynamic model that can include several design parameters and working conditions has been employed to model the dynamic of compound faults for the first time. The effect of fault severity, noise, working conditions, and design parameters on the diagnosis efficiency have been investigated. The qualitative and quantitative assessment of fault diagnosis has been accomplished via t-SNE and Generalized Discriminative Value (GDV) measures, respectively. The results show that the gear condition indicators are more suitable to assess the general health state of the gearbox. However, their ability to detect the type of fault and decouple compound faults are limited. Furthermore, design parameters of the gear transmission system, such as helix angle and gear width, can highly affect the fault diagnosis efficiency.