Principal Component Analysis Based Gear Fault Diagnostics in Different Stages of a Multi-Stage Gearbox Subjected to Extensive Fluctuating Speeds

Multi-stage gearboxes are vulnerable to failures often due to the extreme operating conditions, which may result in long downtimes. The current investigation is intended to examine the fault diagnostic capabilities of the integrated vibro-acoustic condition monitoring scheme while diagnosing the local/lumped defects exist at different speed stages of a multi-stage gearbox subjected to fluctuating/varying speeds. Experiments are performed, and the raw vibration and acoustic signatures are acquired simultaneously from the three-stage spur gearbox. Later, the raw data signatures are processed individually through discrete wavelet transform, and various descriptive statistics are extracted. Further, feature-level fusion is executed to obtain the integrated vibro-acoustic feature vector set for various speed stages of the gearbox. Finally, the obtained integrated feature vector set is classified using principal component analysis (PCA). It is observed that PCA performed using the integrated vibro-acoustic scheme clearly distinguishes among the various damage severity levels of pinion tooth exist at different speed stages of the gearbox.