Monitoring the Lubrication Condition of Rolling Element Bearings Using the Acoustic Emission Technique

Author(s):  
Yibo Edward Fan ◽  
Zhanqun Shi ◽  
Georgina Harris ◽  
Fengshou Gu ◽  
Andrew Ball

Lubrication condition strongly influences the behaviour and operational life of a rolling element bearing. This paper presented an experimental investigation of rolling element bearings with no lubricant and with grease-lubricant containing contaminants using the acoustic emission (AE) technique. High frequency sampling and data streaming technology were applied in the measurement of AE, instead of traditionally measured AE parameters such as the counts, events, and peak amplitude of the signal etc. By processing the AE signals with frequency domain analysis technology, the no lubricant and containing contaminants conditions can be clearly discriminated. This result proved that the frequency domain AE signal processing technique is a suitable method for monitoring the lubrication condition in rolling element bearings.

2013 ◽  
Vol 569-570 ◽  
pp. 497-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
An Bo Ming ◽  
Zhao Ye Qin ◽  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Fu Lei Chu

Spalling of the races or rolling elements is one of the most common faults in rolling element bearings. Exact estimation of the spall size is helpful to the life prediction for rolling element bearings. In this paper, the dual-impulsive phenomenon in the response of a spalled rolling element bearing is investigated experimentally, where the acoustic emission signals are utilized. A new method is proposed to estimate the spall size by extracting the envelope of harmonics of the ball passing frequency on the outer race from the squared envelope spectrum. Compared with the cepstrum analysis, the proposed procedure shows more powerful anti-noise ability in the fault size evaluation.


2009 ◽  
Vol 131 (6) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongyong He ◽  
Xinming Zhang ◽  
Michael I. Friswell

Rolling element bearings are very common components in rotating machinery. Hence, condition monitoring and the detection of defects are very important for the normal and safe running of these machines. Vibration based techniques are well established for the condition monitoring of rolling element bearings, although they are not so effective in detecting incipient defects in the bearing. Acoustic emission (AE) is receiving increasing attention as a complementary method for condition monitoring of bearings as AE is very sensitive to incipient defects. This paper presents an experimental study to investigate the AE characteristics of bearing defect and validates the relationship between various AE parameters and the operational condition of rolling element bearings. To analyze the characteristic vibration frequency of the bearing using the AE signal, short-time rms and autocorrelation functions are integrated to extract the actual characteristic frequency. The AE signal is then analyzed using standard parameters of the signals to explore the source characteristics and sensitivity of typical rolling element bearing faults. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is very effective to extract the actual characteristic frequency of the bearing by AE signal. Furthermore the AE parameters are always sensitive to the running and fault conditions, which have a strong influence on the strain and deformation within the bearing material.


2005 ◽  
Vol 293-294 ◽  
pp. 347-354 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guo Bi ◽  
Jin Chen ◽  
Jun He ◽  
Fuchang Zhou ◽  
Gui Cai Zhang

Minor and random slip between rolling elements and races in rolling element bearings makes vibration signals have periodically time-varying ensemble statistics, which is known as cyclostationarity. Two second-order cyclostationary methods, the spectral correlation density (SCD) and the degree of cyclostationarity (DCS), are talked about in this paper based on a statistical model of rolling element bearings. The SCD provides redundant information in bi-frequency plane and cyclic frequency domain embodies the majority of it, which is a series of non-zero discrete cyclic frequencies completely reflecting the fault characters of rolling element bearings. The DCS has virtues of less computation and clearer representation, at the same time keeps the same characters with SCD in cyclic frequency domain. And the DCS is also proved to be resistant to the additive and multiplicative stationary noise. Simulation and experiential results from three rolling element bearing faults: outer race defect, inner race defect and rolling element defect, indicate practicability of the DCS analysis in rolling element bearing condition monitoring and fault diagnosis.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107754632110161
Author(s):  
Aref Aasi ◽  
Ramtin Tabatabaei ◽  
Erfan Aasi ◽  
Seyed Mohammad Jafari

Inspired by previous achievements, different time-domain features for diagnosis of rolling element bearings are investigated in this study. An experimental test rig is prepared for condition monitoring of angular contact bearing by using an acoustic emission sensor for this purpose. The acoustic emission signals are acquired from defective bearing, and the sensor takes signals from defects on the inner or outer race of the bearing. By studying the literature works, different domains of features are classified, and the most common time-domain features are selected for condition monitoring. The considered features are calculated for obtained signals with different loadings, speeds, and sizes of defects on the inner and outer race of the bearing. Our results indicate that the clearance, sixth central moment, impulse, kurtosis, and crest factors are appropriate features for diagnosis purposes. Moreover, our results show that the clearance factor for small defects and sixth central moment for large defects are promising for defect diagnosis on rolling element bearings.


Author(s):  
A. Albers ◽  
M. Dickerhof

The application of Acoustic Emission technology for monitoring rolling element or hydrodynamic plain bearings has been addressed by several authors in former times. Most of these investigations took place under idealized conditions, to allow the concentration on one single source of emission, typically recorded by means of a piezoelectric sensor. This can be achieved by either eliminating other sources in advance or taking measures to shield them out (e. g. by placing the acoustic emission sensor very close to the source of interest), so that in consequence only one source of structure-born sound is present in the signal. With a practical orientation this is often not possible. In point of fact, a multitude of potential sources of emission can be worth considering, unfortunately superimposing one another. The investigations reported in this paper are therefore focused on the simultaneous monitoring of both bearing types mentioned above. Only one piezoelectric acoustic emission sensor is utilized, which is placed rather far away from the monitored bearings. By derivation of characteristic values from the sensor signal, different simulated defects can be detected reliably: seeded defects in the inner and outer race of rolling element bearings as well as the occurrence of mixed friction in the sliding surface bearing due to interrupted lubricant inflow.


Author(s):  
Yuan Lan ◽  
Xiaohong Han ◽  
Weiwei Zong ◽  
Xiaojian Ding ◽  
Xiaoyan Xiong ◽  
...  

Rolling element bearings constitute the key parts on rotating machinery, and their fault diagnosis is of great importance. In many real bearing fault diagnosis applications, the number of fault data is much less than the number of normal data, i.e. the data are imbalanced. Many traditional diagnosis methods will get low accuracy because they have a natural tendency to favor the majority class by assuming balanced class distribution or equal misclassification cost. To deal with imbalanced data, in this article, a novel two-step fault diagnosis framework is proposed to diagnose the status of rolling element bearings. Our proposed framework consists of two steps for fault diagnosis, where Step 1 makes use of weighted extreme learning machine in an effort to classify the normal or abnormal categories, and Step 2 further diagnoses the underlying anomaly in detail by using preliminary extreme learning machine. In addition, gravitational search algorithm is applied to further extract the significant features and determine the optimal parameters of the weighted extreme learning machine and extreme learning machine classifiers. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is testified on the raw data collected from the rolling element bearing experiments conducted in our Institute, and the empirical results show that our approach is really fast and can achieve the diagnosis accuracies more than 96%.


Author(s):  
Félix Leaman ◽  
Cristián Molina Vicuña ◽  
Elisabeth Clausen

Abstract Background The acoustic emission (AE) analysis has been used increasingly for gearbox diagnostics. Since AE signals are of non-linear, non-stationary and broadband nature, traditional signal processing techniques such as envelope spectrum must be carefully applied to avoid a wrong fault diagnosis. One signal processing technique that has been used to enhance the demodulation process for vibration signals is the empirical mode decomposition (EMD). Until now, the combination of both techniques has not yet been used to improve the fault diagnostics in gearboxes using AE signals. Purpose In this research we explore the use of the EMD to improve the demodulation process of AE signals using the Hilbert transform and enhance the representation of a gear fault in the envelope spectrum. Methods AE signals were measured on a planetary gearbox (PG) with a ring gear fault. A comparative signal analysis was conducted for the envelope spectra of the original AE signals and the obtained intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) considering three types of filters: highpass filter in the whole AE range, bandpass filter based on IMF spectra analysis and bandpass filter based on the fast kurtogram. Results It is demonstrated how the results of the envelope spectrum analysis can be improved by the selection of the relevant frequency band of the IMF most affected by the fault. Moreover, not considering a complementary signal processing technique such as the EMD prior the calculation of the envelope of AE signals can lead to a wrong fault diagnosis in gearboxes. Conclusion The EMD has the potential to reveal frequency bands in AE signals that are most affected by a fault and improve the demodulation process of these signals. Further research shall focus on overcome issues of the EMD technique to enhance its application to AE signals.


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