Gearbox Fault Diagnosis based on Vibration Signals Measured Remotely

In many cases, it is impractical to measure the vibrations directly at or close to their source.
It is a common practice to measure the vibration at a location far from the source for condition
monitoring purposes. The vibration measured in this way inevitably has high distortions from the
vibrations due to the effect of the attenuation of signal paths and the interference from other sources.
The suppression of the distortions is a key issue for the remote measurements based condition
monitoring. In this paper, the influences of transducer locations are investigated on a typical gearbox
transmission system for the detection of the faults induced to the gearbox. Several signal processing
techniques’ analysis results show that the attenuation and interference cause high influences on the
gear transmission signals. However, time synchronous average (TSA) is very effective to detect the
local faults induced to the gear system.