Detection and diagnosis of the gear fault by the delayed correlation-envelope technique

In order to reveal the defect signature of rolling element bearings or gearboxes, the vibration signals measured on them are usually demodulated by the envelope analysis, i.e. Hilbert Transform. However, the defect signature obtained by this demodulation is often masked by noise. In this paper, a new method of demodulation, Delayed Correlation-Envelope analysis is established to suppress the noise. The autocorrelation functions of vibration signals measured on bearings and gearboxes are first computed, then the autocorrelation functions are delayed for some time lags, which will reduce the noise further. The delayed autocorrelation is then demodulated by Hilbert Transform. The effect of time delay on the demodulation results is also discussed. The effectiveness of this method is confirmed by both simulation and experiment.