Early Detection of Gear Failure by Vibration Analysis

Gear mechanisms are an important element in a variety of mechanical systems, such as industrial machinery and automotive. Health monitoring of rotating machines is important to avoid failure of the system in advance. Principally, this paper consists of two parts: in the first part, a gear dynamic model including localized tooth defect has been developed. The model consists of a spur gear pair, two inertias. The model incorporates the effects of time-varying mesh stiffness and damping, excitation due to gear errors. The results of a dynamic modeling of the gears transmission are calculated by using the Newmark integration scheme. The second part consists of signal processing of simulated and experimental signals using the wavelet transform. It is shown that the kurtosis of the vibration signal is a sensitive indicator of the existence of damage in the gear pair.