Gear fault identification and localization using analytic wavelet transform of vibration signal

The aim of this present work is to identify and localize the defect in gear and measure the angle between two damaged teeth in the time domain of the vibration signal. The vibration signals are captured from the experiments and the burst in the vibration signal is focused in the analysis. The enveloping technique is revisited for defect identification but is found unsatisfactory in measuring the angle between two faulty teeth. A signal processing scheme is proposed to filter the noise and to measure the angle between two damaged teeth. The proposed technique consists of undecimated wavelet transform (UWT), which is used to denoise the signal. The analytic wavelet transform (AWT) has been implemented on approximation signal followed by a time marginal integration (TMI) of the AWT scalogram. The TMI graph time-axis is mapped onto the angular displacement of the driver gear. The measurement is shown to identify the first and the second defective teeth impact on gear meshing, which is visible as sharp spikes in the TMI graph. An attempt is also made to replace the approximation from UWT with Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF) derived from the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). The present experimental work establishes the proposed method of measuring and localizing multiple gear teeth defect using vibration signal in the time domain. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.