Application of spectral kurtosis for detection of a tooth crack in the planetary gear of a wind turbine

This paper presents the application of the spectral kurtosis technique for detection of a tooth crack in the planetary gear of a wind turbine. The work originated from a real case of catastrophic gear failure on a wind turbine, which was not detected by currently applied methods. Nevertheless, several sets of complete vibration data were recorded and analyzed. The authors explored a number of methods commonly applied in online vibration monitoring and diagnostic systems. Those methods did not react to the failure until a few minutes before the failure. Then the method of time domain averaging of the meshing vibration is investigated. In this case, however, averaging does not detect any trace of the tooth crack, primarily because of the extreme frequency range (>four decades) of the fault symptoms. The application of the method is shown, and then the limitations of the averaging in such a case are presented and discussed. Finally, the authors propose a method based on spectral kurtosis, which yields good results. This method was able to detect the existence of the tooth crack several weeks before the gear failure. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.