Detection and Diagnosis of Gear Fault By the Single Gear Tooth Analysis Technique

This paper presents a procedure of sing le gear tooth analysis for early detection and diagnosis of gear faults. The objec tive of this procedure is to develop a method for more sensitive detection of th e incipient faults and locating the faults in the gear. The main idea of the sin gle gear tooth analysis is that the vibration signals collected with a high samp ling rate are divided into a number of segments with the same time interval. The number of signal segments is equal to that of the gear teeth. The analysis of i ndividual segments reveals more sensitively the changes of the vibration signals in both time and frequency domain caused by gear faults. In addition, the locat ion of a failed tooth can be indicated in terms of the position of the segment t hat deviates from the normal segments. An experimental investigation verified th e advantages of the single gear tooth analysis.