USING VIBRATION MONITORING FOR LOCAL FAULT DETECTION ON GEARS OPERATING UNDER FLUCTUATING LOAD CONDITIONS
✍ Scribed by C.J. STANDER; P.S. HEYNS; W. SCHOOMBIE
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2002
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 352 KB
- Volume
- 16
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-3270
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✦ Synopsis
Gearboxes often operate under fluctuating load conditions during service. Conventional techniques for monitoring vibration are based on the assumption that changes in the measured structural response are caused by deterioration in the condition of the gearbox. However, this assumption is not valid for fluctuating load conditions. To find a methodology that could deal with such conditions, experiments were conducted on a gearbox test rig with different levels of tooth damage severity and the capability of applying fluctuating loads to the gear system. Different levels of fluctuation in constant loads as well as in sinusoidal, step and chirp loads were considered. The test data were order tracked and time synchronously averaged with the rotation of the shaft in order to compensate for the variation in rotational speed induced by the fluctuating loads. A pseudo-Wigner-Ville distribution was then applied to the test data, in order to identify the influence of the fluctuating load conditions. In this work, a vibration waveform normalisation approach is presented, which enables the use of the pseudo-Wigner-Ville distribution to indicate deteriorating fault conditions under fluctuating load conditions. Statistical parameters and various other features were extracted from the distribution in order to indicate the linear separation of the values for various fault conditions, after applying the vibration waveform normalisation approach. Feature vectors were compiled for the various fault and load conditions. Mahalanobis distances were calculated between the various feature vectors and an average feature vector was compiled from data measured on the undamaged gearbox. It was proved that the Mahalanobis distance could be used as a single parameter, which can readily be monotonically trended to indicate the progression of a fault condition under fluctuating load conditions. It was shown that a single layer perceptron network could be trained with the perceptron learning rule within a finite number of iterations.