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

• Main Authors: Yongzhi Qu, David He, Jae Yoon, Brandon Van Hecke, Eric Bechhoefer, Junda Zhu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2014-01-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: gearbox faults; diagnostics; acoustic emission sensor; vibration sensor
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/14/1/1372

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.