Abstract
Bending fatigue crack is a dangerous and insidious mode of failure in gears. As it produces no debris in its early stages, it gives little warning during its progression, and usually results in either immediate loss of serviceability or greatly reduced power transmitting capacity. This paper presents the applications of vibration-based techniques (i.e. conventional time and frequency domain analysis, cepstrum, and continuous wavelet transform) to real gear vibrations in the early detection, diagnosis and advancement monitoring of a real tooth fatigue crack and compares their detection and diagnostic capabilities on the basis of experimental results. Gear fatigue damage is achieved under heavy-loading conditions and the gearbox is allowed to run until the gears suffer badly from complete tooth breakage. It has been found that the initiation and progression of fatigue crack cannot be easily detected by conventional time and frequency domain approaches until the fault is significantly developed. On the contrary, the wavelet transform is quite sensitive to any change in gear vibration and reveals fault features earlier than other methods considered.
Highlights
Maintenance costs comprise a major part of the total operating expenses for all manufacturing or production plants and, depending on the specific industry, maintenance costs could be up to 60 percent of the cost of goods produced
Over the last two decades, vibration analysis is extensively used as the basis for fault detection in gearboxes and condition indicating information is obtained by employing different techniques including: conventional signature analysis in time and frequency domains [4,5,6,7], signal demodulation [8,9,10], and cepstrum [11,12] techniques
This paper presents the applications of vibration-based techniques to real gear vibrations in the early detection,diagnosis and advancement monitoring of a real tooth fatigue crack in helical gears
Summary
Maintenance costs comprise a major part of the total operating expenses for all manufacturing or production plants and, depending on the specific industry, maintenance costs could be up to 60 percent of the cost of goods produced. Over the last two decades, vibration analysis is extensively used as the basis for fault detection in gearboxes and condition indicating information is obtained by employing different techniques including: conventional signature analysis in time and frequency domains [4,5,6,7], signal demodulation [8,9,10], and cepstrum [11,12] techniques. This paper presents the applications of vibration-based techniques (i.e. conventional time and frequency domain approaches, cepstrum, and wavelet transform) to real gear vibrations in the early detection,diagnosis and advancement monitoring of a real tooth fatigue crack in helical gears. The averaged gear vibrations monitored at two-minute intervals are used in the time domain analysis and it was found that early fault indications are revealed at the 10th minute of the running test. As the testing time is extended, fault features are strengthened at the same gear positions where the defective tooth (or teeth) is in mesh and their effect is seen across a large frequency range
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
