Condition Monitoring of Journal Bearings for Predictive Maintenance Management Based on High Frequency Vibration Analysis

Journal bearings are widely used as rotor supports in many machinery systems such as engines, motors, turbines and huge pumps. The journal bearing is simply designed, highly efficient, has a long life, low cost and doesn’t fail easily. Based on preventive maintenance strategies, many monitoring techniques are developed for monitoring journal bearings such as lubricant analysis, vibration analysis, noise and acoustic emission analysis. Vibration monitoring techniques have been developed and it can be implemented online or offline without interrupting the machine operations. The vibration phenomena in a journal bearing is complicated which combined between different types of signals created by different sources. To understand this phenomenon, a vibration model is established for fault diagnosis, which includes not only conventional hydrodynamic forces but also excitations of both asperity collisions and churns. However, mis-operations and oil degradation in the journal bearings might cause unexpected and sudden failure which is risky in machines and operators. Consequently, clustering technique is used to investigate into vibration responses of journal bearings for identifying different lubrication regimes as categorised by the classic Stribeck curve. High frequency clustering allows different lubricant oils and different lubrication regimes to be identified appropriately, providing feasible ways for online monitoring of bearing conditions. Additionally, modulation signal bispectrum magnitude results represent the nonlinear vibration responses with two distinctive bifrequency patterns corresponding to instable lubrication and asperity interactions. Using entropy measures, these instable operating conditions are classified to be the low loads cases. Furthermore, average MSB magnitudes are used to differentiate the asperity interactions between asperity collisions and the asperity churns. In addition, the oil starvation of a journal bearing has been found by MSB analysis that the instable frequency can affect the measured vibration responses. Moreover, the structural resonances in the high frequency range can better reflect the separation of different oil levels under wide operating conditions. Finally, As a result of worn bearings, shaft fluctuation increases and asperity collisions decreases. Thus a worn bearing is not all the time good because of instability.