Gearbox Tooth Cut Fault Diagnostics Using Acoustic Emission and Vibration Sensors — A Comparative Study

Sensors

Yongzhi Qu²  David He²  Jae Yoon²  Brandon Van Hecke²  Eric Bechhoefer¹ 

[1] Green Power Monitoring Systems, LLC, Essex Junction, VT 05452, USA; E-Mail:;Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA; E-Mails:

关键词: gearbox faults;    diagnostics;    acoustic emission sensor;    vibration sensor;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s140101372

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

In recent years, acoustic emission (AE) sensors and AE-based techniques have been developed and tested for gearbox fault diagnosis. In general, AE-based techniques require much higher sampling rates than vibration analysis-based techniques for gearbox fault diagnosis. Therefore, it is questionable whether an AE-based technique would give a better or at least the same performance as the vibration analysis-based techniques using the same sampling rate. To answer the question, this paper presents a comparative study for gearbox tooth damage level diagnostics using AE and vibration measurements, the first known attempt to compare the gearbox fault diagnostic performance of AE- and vibration analysis-based approaches using the same sampling rate. Partial tooth cut faults are seeded in a gearbox test rig and experimentally tested in a laboratory. Results have shown that the AE-based approach has the potential to differentiate gear tooth damage levels in comparison with the vibration-based approach. While vibration signals are easily affected by mechanical resonance, the AE signals show more stable performance.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2014 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.