Fault Diagnosis System of Rolling Bearing Based on Ultrasonic Signal

Abstract

The bearing of rotating machinery often fails due to the frictional forces of rolling element, in the early stages of the faults, a series of ultrasound can be generated in short time intervals, which occur at bearing characteristic frequencies. Since the frequencies of ultrasonic signal are very high, they will lead to much higher computing burden when using the common technique of Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT) directly. In this paper, envelope detection technology and heterodyne technology which integrated in an ultrasonic data collection system are used to reduce the frequency effectively. To allow for the easier detection of the bearing faults, these two techniques has been used together with FFT. A verification research with respect to vibration analysis is carried out to analyze the effectiveness and superiority of ultrasonic data collection in time domain and frequency domain aspects respectively. Extensive experiments have been performed in an Alternating Current (AC) motor system, and the results indicated that this ultrasonic data collection system is as useful as vibration analysis system in diagnosing the faults of bearings. In addition, it is more sensitive in fault diagnosis in the early stages of the bearing faults than vibration acquisition system.