Comparison of Vibration, Sound and Motor Current Signature Analysis for Detection of Gear Box Faults

Abstract

Gear box is used in automobiles and industries for power transmission under different working conditions and applications. Failure in a gear box at unexpected time leads to increase in machine downtime and maintenance cost. In order to overcome these losses, the most effective condition monitoring technique has to be used for early detection of faults. Vibration and sound signal analysis have been used for monitoring the condition of rotating machineries. Motor Current Signature Analysis (MCSA) has rarely been used in gearbox condition monitoring. This work presents a methodology based on vibration, sound and motor current signal analysis for diagnosis of gearbox faults under various simulated gear and bearing fault conditions. Statistical features were extracted from the raw data of these three transducer signals and the best features were selected from the extracted features. Then the selected features were given as an input to Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers and their performances were compared. In recent years, Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV) are gaining more interest for their advances and this work had a scope in monitoring the power loss in hybrid electric vehicle gearbox using MCSA.