Research on Instantaneous Angular Speed Signal Separation Method for Planetary Gear Fault Diagnosis

Planetary gear train is a critical transmission component in large equipment such as helicopters and wind turbines. Conducting damage perception of planetary gear trains is of great significance for the safe operation of equipment. Existing methods for damage perception of planetary gear trains mainly rely on linear vibration analysis. However, these methods based on linear vibration signal analysis face challenges such as rich vibration sources, complex signal coupling and modulation mechanisms, significant influence of transmission paths, and difficulties in separating damage information. This paper proposes a method for separating instantaneous angular speed (IAS) signals for planetary gear fault diagnosis. Firstly, this method obtains encoder pulse signals through a built-in encoder. Based on this, it calculates the IAS signals using the Hilbert transform, and obtains the time-domain synchronous average signal of the IAS of the planetary gear through time-domain synchronous averaging technology, thus realizing the fault diagnosis of the planetary gear train. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the calculated IAS signals, demonstrating that the time-domain synchronous averaging technology can highlight impact characteristics, effectively separate and extract fault impacts, greatly reduce the testing cost of experiments, and provide an effective tool for the fault diagnosis of planetary gear trains.

Rolling Bearing Condition Monitoring Technique Based on Cage Rotation Analysis and Acoustic Emission

In this paper,we present an alternative technique for detecting changes in the operating conditions of rolling element bearings(REBs)that can lead to premature failure.The developed technique is based on measuring the kinematics of the bearing cage.The rotational motion of the cage is driven by traction forces generated in the contacts of the rolling elements with the races.It is known that the cage angular frequency relative to shaft angular frequency depends on the bearing load,the bearing speed,and the lubrication condition since these factors determine the lubricant film thickness and the associated traction forces.Since a large percentage of REB failures are due to misalignment or lubrication problems,any evidence of these conditions should be interpreted as an incipient fault.In this paper,a novel method for the measurement of the instantaneous angular speed(IAS)of the cage is developed.The method is evaluated in a deep groove ball bearing test rig equipped with a cage IAS sensor,as well as a custom acoustic emission(AE)transducer and a piezoelectric accelerometer.The IAS of the cage is analyzed under different bearing loads and shaft speeds,showing the dependence of the cage angular speed with the calculated lubricant film thickness.Typical bearing faulty operating conditions(mixed lubrication regime,lubricant depletion,and misalignment)are recreated.It is shown that the cage IAS is dependent on the lubrication regime and is sensitive to misalignment.The AE signal is also used to evaluate the lubrication regime.Experimental results suggest that the proposed technique can be used as a condition monitoring tool in industrial environments to detect abnormal REB conditions that may lead to premature failure.

Vibration-based synchronous sampling and its application in wind-turbine drive-train-condition monitoring

Utilizing shaft-speed information to analyse vibration signals is an important method for fault diagnosis and condition monitoring of rotating machineries,especially for those running at variable speeds.However,in many cases,shaft-speed information is not always available,for a variety of reasons.Fortunately,in most of the measurements,the shaft-speed information is embedded in the vibration response in many different forms,such as in the format of the fundamental shaft-rotation-frequency response and its harmonics,and the gear-meshing-frequency response and its harmonics,etc.Proper signal processing can be used to extract the shaft instantaneous speed from the measured vibration responses.In existing instantaneous shaft-speed-identification methods,a narrow-bandpass filtering technique is used explicitly or implicitly.In a complex gearbox system,such as that used in a wind turbine,the gear-meshing-response component could be modulated by many other shaft speeds,due to the configuration of the gearbox or due to the existence of component damage.As a result,it is very difficult to isolate a single vibration-response component for instantaneous shaft-speed detection.In this paper,an innovative approach is presented.The instantaneous shaft speed is extracted based on maxima tracking from the vibration-response spectrogram.A numerical integration scheme is employed to obtain the shaft instantaneous phase.Digital-domain synchronous resampling is then applied to the vibration data by using the instantaneous phase information.Due to the nature of noise suppression in the numerical integration,the accuracy of synchronous sampling is greatly improved.This proposed approach demonstrates the feasibility and engineering applicability through a controlled laboratory test case and two field wind-turbine cases.More detailed results and conclusions of this research are presented at the end of this paper.