Fault Diagnosis of Crack on Gearbox Using Vibration-Based Approaches

Abstract

This study experimentally investigates vibration-based approaches for fault diagnosis of automotive gearboxes. The primary objective is to identify methods that can detect gear-tooth cracks, a common fault in gearboxes. Vibrational signals were supervised on a gearbox test rig under different operating conditions of gears with three symmetrical crack depths (1, 2, and 3 mm). The severity of the gear-tooth cracks was predicted from the vibrational signal dataset using an artificial feedforward multilayer neural network with backpropagation (NNBP). The vibration amplitudes were the greatest when the crack size in the high-speed shaft was 3 mm, and the root mean square of its vibration speed was below 3.5 mm/s. The vibration amplitudes of the gearbox increased with increasing depth of the tooth cracks under different operating conditions. The NNBP predicted the states of gear-tooth cracks with an average recognition rate of 80.41% under different conditions. In some cases, the fault degree was difficult to estimate via time-domain analysis as the vibration level increases were small and not easily noticed. Results also showed that when using the same statistical features, the time-domain analysis can better detect crack degree compared to the neural network technique.

Keywords

• gear-crack detection
• vibration-based approaches
• artificial neural network
• fault recognition