Weak Fault Feature Extraction Scheme for Intershaft Bearings Based on Linear Prediction and Order Tracking in the Rotation Speed Difference Domain

Because both the inner and outer rings rotate, the intershaft bearings used in gas turbines do not have fixed bearing housings. As a result, the vibration of intershaft bearings cannot be measured directly. Therefore, a vibration signal can only be collected through indirect measurement. First, it must be transferred to adjacent bearings through the shafting. Then, it should be transferred by the elastic supports and complex structure of the thin-walled strut. The vibration signal is severely weakened during transmission under the influences of the transfer path. In the meantime, in the vibration of other components, a huge amount of noise is produced by the air flow, and the variable speeds of the inner and outer rings of the intershaft bearings make it harder to analyze the signal. Hence, it is very difficult to extract the vibration fault features of intershaft bearings. To deal with the variable speed of dual rotors, as well as the weak signal, a fault feature extraction scheme for the weak fault signals of intershaft bearings is proposed in this paper. This scheme is based on linear prediction, spectral kurtosis, and order tracking in the rotation speed difference domain. First, a prewhitening process, based on linear prediction, is applied to the fault signal of the intershaft bearings to eliminate the stationary component. Thus, the remaining components, including the impulse signal of faulty bearings and nonstationary noise, can retain the features of the vibrational bearings, in addition to reducing the noise. Second, the optimal center frequency and bandwidth of the band-pass filter, applied to resonant demodulation, are selected by spectral kurtosis. Subsequently, the enveloped signal containing the features of the faults found in the intershaft bearings is obtained by resonance demodulation. The quasi-stationary signal in the angle domain is acquired by the even angle resampling of the nonstationary envelope signal, as a result of the variable speed. The final order spectrum is obtained through a Fourier transform. Fault diagnosis can be conducted for the intershaft bearings by comparing this spectrum with the feature order of the bearing fault. Experiments were conducted to verify the validity of the proposed scheme.