International Journal of Mechanical and Production

Engineering Research and Development (IJMPERD)

ISSN (P): 2249–6890; ISSN (E): 2249–8001
Vol. 10, Issue 3, Jun 2020, 127–136
© TJPR Pvt. Ltd.

GEAR CRACK DETECTION UNDER VARIABLE ROTATING SPEED CONDITIONS

USING A SINGLE CHANNEL ACCELEROMETER

NGUYEN PHONG DIEN1 & Dr. NGUYEN TRONG DU2

1Associate Professor, School of Mechanical Engineering, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam
2Reserach Scholar, School of Mechanical Engineering, Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam
ABSTRACT

The present study aims to detect gear cracks early at variable gear speeds from vibration signals measured by a single
channel accelerometer. The analysis procedure combines the Order Tracking Method (OTM) and the Order Cepstrum
Method (OCM), in which a key-phase reference signal is not required. A suitable approach for gear crack detection in
gearboxes operating under non-stationary conditions is also proposed and experimentally verified.

KEYWORDS: Gearbox, Order Tracking, Cepstrum & Gear Crack

Received: Mar 13, 2020; Accepted: Apr 03, 2020; Published: Apr 27, 2020; Paper Id.: IJMPERDJUN202012

1. INTRODUCTION

Original Article
Gears are essential elements in mechanical power transmission systems. They are used to change the speed and torque.
The working efficiency of them will decrease when it is damaged. Early fault identification systems for the gear enable
detecting and diagnosing initial faults or fault causes. That allows maintenance planning or limitations to the extent of
damages to reduce the downtime for production equipment. The traditional vibration-based signal processing methods
were almost applied to gearboxes operating at constant speeds. However, when the gearbox runs under varying speeds
or loads, its mechanical vibrations will become non-stationary, whose amplitude and frequency are time-varying. As a
result, traditional analysis techniques can not be applied. In recent years, Time-Synchronous Averaging (TSA) [1] and
order tracking [2] are two commonly used methods to overcome these drawbacks. The TSA method has been known as
a useful analysis tool for gearbox condition monitoring.

The conventional TSA method is performed by dividing the signal into segments by means of a reference
phase signal, resampling each signal segment with the same number of sampling points, and averaging resampled
signal segments to get the TSA signal that remains periodic components and attenuates asynchronous, non-periodic
components and noises [3]. However, averaging signal segments may lead to the loss of useful information in the
original signal.

Order tracking is another approach to remove asynchronous components without losing essential information
on the signal. This technique uses the instantaneous phase to resample the original signal at a fixed angular increment.
This technique also requires a reference phase signal in the form of a pulse sequence (tacho-pulse or tacho-signal) that
is usually generated by an additional phase probe or a tachometer. In many application cases, the installation of a
tachometer is difficult to implement or increases measurement costs.

Therefore, order tracking methods without phase signals, namely the tacho-less method, have been proposed
to overcome the limitation mentioned above. Bonnardot and his colleagues [4] firstly proposed a called tacho-less

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128 Nguyen Phong Dien & Nguyen Trong Du

method and applied it in the detection of gearbox faults under operation conditions with small gear speed fluctuation. Zhao et
al. [5] subsequently extended this tacho-less method to large speed variation cases.

If the temporal variation of the instantaneous rotation frequency of the gear is determined, it is easy to create the
corresponding tacho-signal [6; 7]. Time-Frequency Analysis (TFA) is one of the most effective methods for Instantaneous
Frequency (IF) estimation, and therefore receives much attention from researchers. Urbanek [8] estimated IF using
time-frequency distribution by spectrogram and extracting the maximum-energy time-frequency ridge from time-frequency
distribution of signals. However, the method such as spectrogram or windowed Fourier transform is usually restricted by
time-frequency resolution and therefore, may give inaccurate evaluation results [9]. In the last decade, a number of more
sophisticated methods have been proposed to improve time-frequency resolution. The synchrosqueezing transform [10] is one
of them.

For the vibration diagnosis of machines, the tacho-less order tracking method is just a preprocessing step. The
detection of damage location depends on the later stage of vibration signal processing. Wang et al. [11] estimated the
instantaneous frequency with TFA to create the order spectrum for the detection of gear faults in wind turbine gearbox. Zhao
et al. [12] combined tacho-less order tracking with envelope spectrum method and Kurtogram diagram for bearing diagnosis.
Wang et al. [13] also detect bearing fault based on phase demodulation function estimation and envelope order spectrum.

This study proposes an improvement in the estimation of the instantaneous phase and frequency of rotating
machines. In this proposal, the estimation of the instantaneous phase is extracted from time-frequency distributions that are
achieved by wavelet synchrosqueezing transform. Afterward, the OCM method [14] is performed with the resampled signal in
the angle domain to detect gear crack faults in non-stationary operating conditions.

After the introduction, a theoretical background of the proposed method is recommended in section 2. In Section 3,
the proposed method is demonstrated and verified by an experimental test conducted at a gearbox.

2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1 Order Tracking using the Computed Tacho-Pulse

This section presents a procedure to recover tacho pulses from a measured vibration signal on gearbox hosing by an
accelerometer. Hence, the order tracking technique should be performed using these pulses. A flow chart of the procedure is
represented on figure 1, including the following steps:

Step 1: Construct a Time-Frequency Distribution (TFD) from the acceleration signal

There are several algorithms available for representation of signals in the time-frequency domain, such as the
windowed Fourier or the wavelet transform. In this article, The wavelet-based synchrosqueezing transform (WSST) [15] is
suggested due to its outstanding abilities compared with others. Because the basic wavelet function of WSST can be flexibly
adjusted to the original signal, we can achieve a time-frequency representation having high resolution. Furthermore, this
method is secure with measurement noise, and then it can generate accurate time-frequency distribution of signals, even when
the signal-to-noise ratio is small. In this context, the kth GMF harmonic f mk will be extracted from the original signal. These

harmonics can be filtered by bandpass filtering only in the case that there is small speed variation, and the adjacent frequency
lines in the spectrum are separable, which is illustrated in figure 2a. When the rotating speed has large fluctuations, the

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frequency-bands will overlap in the spectrum, as shown in figure 2b. Thus, it cannot be filtered by bandpass filtering. In order
to get over this drawback, generalized demodulation based on the generalized Fourier transform (GFT) will be introduced as
follows.

Figure 1: Principles of Tacho Pulse Recovery from the Acceleration Signal.

Step 2: Recover the kth GMF harmonic

For a signal x(t), the GFT is given by


XG  f    x t  e
 i 2 [ft  s0  t  ]
dt (1)


where s0(t) is a time function that specifies the evolutionary phase behavior of x(t).

By introducing

u t   x t  e
i 2 s0  t 
(2)

Eq. (1) can be written in the following form


XG  f    u t  e
 i 2 ft
dt (3)


Appling the conventional inverse Fourier transform, it follows that


u t    X  f e
G
i 2 ft
df (4)


Comparison of Eq. (2) with Eq. (4) leads to


x t   e  X  f e
i 2 s0  t  i 2 ft
G df (5)


According to the property of Fourier transformation, assuming that X G  f     f  f0  , where  denotes Dirac

delta function, this yields


df  e  0 0 
i 2 f t  s  t 
x t   e    f  f e
i 2 s0  t  i 2 ft
0 (6)


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130 Nguyen Phong Dien & Nguyen Trong Du

From Eq. (6), the instantaneous frequency is given by

d  t 
f t    f 0  s0  t  (7)
2 dt

Eq. (7) shows that, if the parameter s0  t  is chosen to satisfy the condition (as shown figure 3a):

s0 t   f t   f0 (8)

f(t) is then mapped at constant frequency f0. Therefore, to straighten kth GMF harmonic (figure 3b), we use the
following algorithm

X G  f   FFT  x(t )e
i 2 s0  t 

 

Conducting a bandpass filter around straightened frequency f(t) (as illustrated in figure3c) to generate X G  f 0  .

Hence, kth GMF harmonic is recovered in the following algorithm (as shown figure 3d):

x  t   iFFT  X G  f 0  e
i 2 s0  t 
 (9)
 

Step 3: Calculate the rotating frequency of the shaft as follows:

f mk
f sh  (10)
k .Z

in which k denotes harmonic order, and Z is the number of gear teeth

Figure 2: Two Frequencies are Separated (a) and Overlapped (b).

Step 4: Instantaneous phase of the signal is obtained by

t
sh (t )  2 . f sh  u .du (11)
0

Step 5: Calculate a tacho pulse instants occurring once per revolution by inverse function:

tP  n   sh1  2 n  (12)

where N is the integer number of shaft revolutions.

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Gear Crack Detection Under Variable Rotating Speed Conditions using 131
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2.2 Computed Tacho-Less Order Cepstrum

The power cepstrum of time-signal x(t) is defined by the following formula:

Cx     F 1 logS x  f  (13)

where F 1   denotes the inverse Fourier transform, S x  f  is the power spectrum with frequency variable f.

Variable τ is called quefrency, which is a measure of time. It is known that the spectrum of a periodic vibration at a
fundamental frequency shows harmonics that are periodic with this frequency, corresponding to only a peak in the power
cepstrum. We can use this property of cepstrum to identify periodic components in a complex multi-component signal, such as
gearbox signal at stationary operating conditions [14]. We note that the power cepstrum can only be applied effectively when
the signal is stationary, i.e., the signal with constant frequencies.

Figure 3: An example to Illustrate the Recovery of kth GMF Harmonic.

In the case of signals with rapidly changing frequencies, such as gearbox signals at variable rotation speeds, these
signals need to be processed by order tracking method. Commonly, a reference signal of tacho pulses is required to implement
the conventional order tracking for the vibration signal. If there is only a single channel accelerometer for this purpose, we can
apply the computed order tracking without a reference signal (the tacho-less order tracking). This technique uses an angular
resampling procedure of a time-sampled vibration signal, in which the original signal is resampled in shaft angle domain with
constant angle increments using a computed tacho-signal and numerical interpolation.

The cepstrum of an angular resampled signal is called the order cepstrum, which is depicted by a cepstral graph
versus the corresponding shaft angle. In summary, we will perform the following steps:

 Step 1. Recovering a reference signal of tacho pulses from the acceleration signal according to the procedure
presented in subsection 2.1

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132 Nguyen Phong Dien & Nguyen Trong Du

 Step 2. Implementing the tacho-less order tracking for the signal using numerical interpolation.
 Step 3. Transforming the resampled signal into the cepstral domain using Eq. (13).

3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULT

In this section, a single-stage gearbox with gear crack fault operating under speed-up conditions is considered. An accelerometer was
installed on gearbox housing to get the vibration transferred from the gear. As you known from the comments above, to accurately
separate tacho pulses, a requirement for the rotating frequency of shaft must be recovered as well as possible. Therefore, a tachometer was
also utilized to get reference rotating frequency for testing its reconstruction. The ratio of gearbox is 14/40, with the pinion was cracked
root of a tooth. The input shaft of the gearbox is driven by a motor that is controlled by an AC inverter to change the rotating speed from
500 rpm to 1000 rpm according to the predefined laws. A sampling rate of vibration signals is 10 kHz.

Figure 4a displays the measured vibration signal in the time domain and its corresponding power spectrum (figure
4b). It is seen that the frequency spectrum is significantly obscured by spectral smearing. Thus, this is a serious problem with
conventional analysis methods, and it has less effective in processing the vibration signal of the gearbox is sampled in the time
domain under variable rotating speed condition.

Figure 4: Time-Domain Signal (a) and Spectrum (b).

The measured acceleration signal is analyzed by wavelet -based synchrosqueezing transform to generate the
time-frequency representation as figure 5a. From this figure, the order harmonics of meshing frequency can be identified
clearly. We chose one order harmonic that is displayed most clearly on the time-frequency representation. This step is
significant for the successful separation of gear meshing frequency.

Figure 5: Time-Frequency Distribution (a) and First Order GMF is Extracted from the Original Signal (b).

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Gear Crack Detection Under Variable Rotating Speed Conditions using 133
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Figure 3 illustrates the exacting procedure. At first, the kernel function s0(t) in Eq. (8) is estimated using numerical
integration, where f(t) is selected from first meshing harmonic, and f0 is the desired straightening frequency component of
meshing harmonic at 200 Hz, as shown in Figure 5a. By applying Eq. (2) the first harmonic is then mapped at constant
frequency f0 of 200 Hz. A bandpass filter is then employed to extract this straightened first harmonic. Finally, we obtain the
waveform of the first gear meshing harmonic, as shown in Figure 5b by taking the inverse GFT.

The extracted GMF is the first order meshing harmonic, which means the k factor equal to 1 in Eq. (10). The shaft
rotating frequency is calculated by dividing the GMF by the number of teeth according to Eq. (10).

Figure 6: The Extracted and Measured Shaft Frequency.

The accuracy of the reconstructed shaft rotating frequency is evaluated by comparing it with the other frequency
measured by a tachometer, as shown in figure 6. It can be observed that the reconstructed shaft frequency is almost hardly
different from the original shaft rotating frequency. The tacho information is recovered from this shaft frequency will be used
as input for resampling the acceleration signal into the angle domain. Thus, the order tracking method has been performed for
the original vibration signal without utilizing any tachometer. After this step, because the effect of variable speed is removed
from the vibration signal, then the vibration of the gearbox comes back steady state.

(a) (b)
Figure 7: Cepstrum of the Resampled Vibration Signal (a) and Original Vibration Signal (b).

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134 Nguyen Phong Dien & Nguyen Trong Du

In the next step, we can apply the order tracking or the order cepstrum method to analyze the resampled signal.
However, as mentioned in this paper [14], the order tracking is less efficient than the order cepstrum method in variable speed
conditions. Thus, the cepstrum transform was chosen in this case.

Figure 7a shows the order cepstrum of the resampled signals. It can be seen from Fig. 7a that the order cepstrum of
the tooth surface corresponds with 360° and its harmonics. The fault in gear can be explained by the peak value according to
the impact pulses through crack position after each revolution. As such, the order cepstrum method has eliminated undesirable
spectral smearing and modulation effects to detect symptoms of the fault quickly. Otherwise, the cepstrum transform is
applied to the initial acceleration signal, as shown in Fig. 7b. It can be seen that it is not showing any signs of the gear fault.

4. CONCLUSIONS

In this study, the wavelet-based synchrosqueezing transform has been applied to extract the instantaneous frequency and
phase from a signal measured by a single channel accelerometer mounted at a gearbox housing. The acceleration signal is then
resampled according to the recovered phase information to general the angle domain signal. In addition, the resampled signal
is transformed into a cepstral domain to obtain the order cepstrum. The experimental results from a test rig have demonstrated
that the proposed method is applicable for the detection of gear cracks in a gearbox operating with variable speeds.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This research is funded by the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST) under project number T2018-PC-214.

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AUTHORS PROFILES

Mr. Nguyen Phong Dien holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics in 2002 from Chemnitz University, Germany. He has been
an Associate Professor of HUST since 2006. He specializes in Engineering Dynamics and Vibration, Technical Diagnostics.
He is a member of the International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science (IFToMM).

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136 Nguyen Phong Dien & Nguyen Trong Du

Mr. Nguyen Trong Du holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics in 2016 from Hanoi University of Science and Technology,
Vietnam. He specializes in Engineering Dynamics and Vibration, Technical Diagnostics.

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