Early failure detection and diagnostics of high speed self aligning journal bearing

Because of their high load carrying capacity and low cost, journal bearings are widely used to support the rotor of industrial machinery with high loads, such as steam turbines, centrifugal compressors and pumps. However, sudden catastrophic failure journal bearings can result in huge economic loss and high safety problems. It is necessary to develop effective condition monitoring technologies to detect and diagnose the failures at early stage and avoid such catastrophic failure. Previous researchers have studied the low frequency vibration characteristics as well as the high frequency vibration and acoustics emission for the early detection of journal bearing failure. However, these studies give relatively little information to the vibro-acoustic characteristics of high speed self aligning journal bearings. This paper focuses on the condition monitoring of high speed self aligning journal bearings through vibro-acoustic analysis.