Fatigue Prediction of a Gear Transmission System based on Vibro-Acoustic Measurements

Gearing components play a pivotal role in most power transmission mechanisms but their application in industry consistently results in significant disruption and losses due to gear failures. This emphasises the significance of condition monitoring and fault diagnostics techniques of gear transmission systems to enhance overall safety and operational reliability in order to minimise gearbox failure rates and their associated disruption and losses to industry. In a wide range of industrial contexts, vibration analysis is extensively used for machinery condition monitoring and
diagnostics due to its good detection results. As vibration and acoustic noise have the same
generation mechanism, acoustic noise can also be used for machinery condition monitoring combined
with effective signal processing methods. In this paper, vibration and acoustic signals were both used to analyse the fatigue process of a gear transmission system based on synchronous vibro-acoustic measurements. In order to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the measured signals, time synchronous average (TSA) technique was employed to pre-process the vibration and acoustic signals. The side band energy ratio (SER) is then extracted to predict the vibration and acoustic signals to indicate the fatigue process of the testing gearbox under different operating conditions. Further the fatigue process was detected through analysing the measured signals in the high frequency band as these are less contaminated by background reverberation interferences. The key results show that the gear transmission system can be monitored by vibration and acoustic analysis which show similar trend results for the gear fatigue process tested.