A comparative study of the effectiveness of vibration and acoustic emission in diagnosing a defective bearing in a planetry gearbox

Faris Elasha, M. Greaves, D. Mba, D. Fang

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    78 Citations (Scopus)
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    Abstract

    Whilst vibration analysis of planetary gearbox faults is relatively well established, the application of Acoustic Emission (AE) to this field is still in its infancy. For planetary-type gearboxes it is more challenging to diagnose bearing faults due to the dynamically changing transmission paths which contribute to masking the vibration signature of interest.The present study is aimed to reduce the effect of background noise whilst extracting the fault feature from AE and vibration signatures. This has been achived through developing of internal AE sensor for helicopter transmission system. In addition, series of signal processing procedure has been developed to improved detection of incipient damage. Three signal processing techniques including an adaptive filter, spectral kurtosis and envelope analysis, were applied to AE and vibration data acquired from a simplified planetary gearbox test rig with a seeded bearing defect. The results show that AE identified the defect earlier than vibration analysis irrespective of the tortuous transmission path.

    NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Applied Acoustics. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Applied Acoustics, 115 (2016) DOI: 10.1016/j.apacoust.2016.07.026
    © 2016, Elsevier. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    Original languageEnglish
    JournalApplied Acoustics
    Volume115
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 13 Sept 2016

    Keywords

    • Vibration analysis
    • Acoustics emission
    • Signal separation
    • Helicopter gearbox
    • HUMs

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