Fault diagnosis of sun gear based on continuous vibration separation and minimum entropy deconvolution

Planetary gearboxes are widely used in equipment like helicopters and wind turbines. Sun gear is located in the center of planetary gearbox. In most cases, sun gear shaft could hardly be directly measured from gearbox casing. Signal transfer paths of planet-sun gear meshing is much longer than that of planet gear, which makes fault diagnosis of sun gear a technical challenge. This paper proposed a fault diagnosis method based on continuous vibration separation(CVS) and minimum entropy deconvolution(MED). In this method, CVS is used to overcome modulation effect caused by planetary movements, as well as restraining noises and asynchronous signal components, MED is used to enhance fault induced impulses if exist. Both simulations and experiments are conducted to test the proposed method, detailed implements of the method are given when processing simulation signals. The results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively diagnosis sun gear fault in planetary gearboxes. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.