Gear fault diagnosis using active noise cancellation and adaptive wavelet transform

Acoustic signal from a gear mesh with faulty gears is in general non-stationary and noisy in nature. Present work demonstrates improvement of Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) by using an active noise cancellation (ANC) method for removing the noise. The active noise cancellation technique is designed with the help of a Finite Impulse Response (FIR) based Least Mean Square (LMS) adaptive filter. The acoustic signal from the healthy gear mesh has been used as the reference signal in the adaptive filter. Inadequacy of the continuous wavelet transform to provide good time-frequency information to identify and localize the defect has been removed by processing the denoised signal using an adaptive wavelet technique. The adaptive wavelet is designed from the signal pattern and used as mother wavelet in the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). The CWT coefficients so generated are compared with the standard wavelet based scalograms and are shown to be apposite in analyzing the acoustic signal. A synthetic signal is simulated to conceptualize and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Synthetic signal analysis also offers vital clues about the suitability of the ANC as a denoising tool, where the error signal is the denoised signal. The experimental validation of the proposed method is presented using a customized gear drive test setup by introducing gears with seeded defects in one or more of their teeth. Measurement of the angles between two or more damaged teeth with a high level of accuracy is shown to be possible using the proposed algorithm. Experiments reveal that acoustic signal analysis can be used as a suitable contactless alternative for precise gear defect identification and gear health monitoring. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.