Misalignment diagnosis of a planetary gearbox based on vibration analysis

As a critical power transmission system, planetary gearbox is widely used in many industrial important machines such as wind turbines, aircraft turbine engines, helicopters. Early fault detection and diagnosis of the gearbox will help to prevent unexpected breakdowns of this important equipment. Misalignment is one of the major operating problems in the planetary gearbox which may be caused by inadequate system integration, variable operating conditions and differences of elastic deformations in the system. In this paper, the effect of varying degrees of installation misalignment of planetary gearbox are investigated based on vibration measurements using spectrum analysis and modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) analysis. It has shown that the misalignment can be diagnosed in the low frequency range in which the adverse effect due to co-occurrence of amplitude modulation and frequency modulation (AM-FM) effect is low compared with the components around meshing frequencies. Moreover, MSB produces a more accurate and reliable diagnosis in that it gives correct indication of the fault severity and location for all operating conditions. In contrast, spectrum can produce correct results for some of the operating conditions.