Modulation Signal Bispectrum Based Monitoring of Tooth Surface Wear for Modification Spiral Bevel Gear

As the contact point and contact path seriously affect the spiral bevel gear mesh characterize, the tooth modification method was applied to manufacture, and tooth contact markers can verify the contact area. However, when the contact area wear happen, the actual contact area may be changed which is not the expectation. And hence, the spiral bevel gear transmission is more sensitive to wear compare with parallel shaft gear transmission. The vibration response would reflect the wear severity. Nonetheless, the relative motion of spiral bevel gear contacting areas, which cause tooth surfaces wear, is rather complex on account of time-vary proportion of rolling and sliding. Moreover, the wear is not uniform, if there were some defects on the surface, the wear would intensify the defect. Modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) has been proven to be an effective monitoring approach which is sensitive to gear tooth defect. Spiral bevel gear tooth modification, which can change the contact area, is very important to the dynamic performance. To assess the improvement of the modification to tooth wear, a run-to-failure experiment of modification spiral bevel gear was carried out under accelerated wear conditions, and MSB method is applied to analysis the gearbox housing vibration signal to indicate the wear progress. The experimental results demonstrated the accuracy and reliability of the MSB-SE monitoring approach proposed.