Model Based Fault Diagnosis in Bevel Gearbox

Abstract

Bevel gearboxes are used in many industrial, automotive, and aerospace applications for transmission purposes. A gearbox should operate without any malfunction to achieve smooth and high performance. Any incipient fault in a gearbox may grow severe, which may lead to high noise and vibration of the gearbox and subsequently lead to failure of the gearbox. It is, therefore, essential to detect the incipient faults at the earliest to avoid premature failures. The effect of the tooth fault is reflected in gear mesh stiffness. In this paper, a mesh stiffness model of missing tooth fault in a bevel gear is proposed. The dynamic response of one stage bevel gearbox with a missing tooth fault is computed to identify the fault feature characteristics of the bevel gearbox. The simulation results show some distinct time domain and frequency domain characteristics for the identification of faults. The simulation results are compared with the vibration responses obtained from the experiment in both the time and frequency domain. The comparison of experimental and simulation results show that the proposed model successfully identifies the missing tooth fault in a bevel gearbox.