Incipient Fault Detection of Rolling Element Bearing Running at Slow Speed

Abstract

The condition of machines gradually deteriorates and this gradual quantitative deterioration leads to its failure. When a fault takes place, some of the machine parameters change. Monitoring of these changed machine parameters entail the developing fault. Rolling element bearing is an important part for any rotating machinery. The vibration generated due to bearing fault at slow speed is of low energy and those are mostly absorbed by the structural path. Moreover, the frequency of vibration for such a case falls much below the cut off frequency of normally available sensor. Capturing and processing of this type of signal requires special care to diagnose the incipient fault of the bearing. An attempt has been made to detect the incipient bearing fault operating at slow speed by collecting vibration signal and processing it. The signals are collected using the sensor with sensitivity > 500 mv/g. The signal is processed using enveloping technique along with wavelet transform to disintegrate the signal into different levels.

Keywords

• slow speed
• incipient fault
• low energy
• structural path
• cut off frequency
• sensor
• signal