Diagnosis of Gear Systems by Spectral Analysis of Vibration Signals

The diagnosis of gearbox faults based on the Fourier analysis of the vibration signal produced from a gear reductor system has proved its limitations in terms of spectral resolution. In this paper, we propose a method for the fault diagnosis of a gear reductor made of two toothed wheels operating at constant conditions. This technique is based on Prony method. The good performances of the proposed method relatively to the synchronous cepstral technique are demonstrated on the basis of experimental data of the vibration signal delivered from the gear reductor system under study. We show that the fault diagnosis of the considered system can be performed by observing the evolution of the power spectrum of the vibration signal during the observation days of the reductor.