Due to bolt looseness or operating ambient temperature, fit clearance can often be found between the outer ring and housing. The vibration characteristics of a cylindrical roller bearing with localized defects are greatly affected by the fit clearance and the accuracy of bearing fault diagnosis may be reduced. Thus, a mathematical model for a cylindrical roller bearing was constructed and the interaction between the outer ring and housing was described. The classical localized defects were modeled, such as the inner ring defect, outer ring defect and roller defect. The relative experiments were conducted to check the constructed model. Then, it was found that the RMS (Root Mean Square) of housing acceleration decreased with increasing housing stiffness and viscous damping. When the fit clearance and friction coefficient increased, the RMS values increased. Except for housing stiffness and viscous damping, there were no uniform change rules of defect frequency amplitudes for other conditions. In the bearing with an outer ring defect or roller defect, the shock times of housing acceleration and the contact force between outer ring and housing were delayed, while fit clearance decreased. However, contrary variation trends were found for the inner ring defect. If the phase difference between defect location and rotor unbalanced force increased, the RMS and acceleration fluctuation amplitudes for the inner ring defect decreased. When the location angle of the outer ring defect increased, RMS and frequency amplitudes increased and RMS_y/RMS decreased. The calculated results may provide the theoretical foundation for condition monitoring rotating machinery systems.

Due to their excellent stability and zero leakage capability, thrust bearings with herringbone spiral grooves are frequently used in transmission mechanisms. However, the lubrication mechanism of thrust bearings has not been clearly understood and explained, preventing the optimization of the bearing performance. Thus, this paper is devoted to solving this problem by building a three-dimensional finite element flow model. In this model, the change in viscosity temperature is considered using Roelands equation, and the turbulence and cavitation are taken into consideration. Using the established model, the influence of parameters such as spiral angle, groove width ratio, and rotational speed on the cavitation area of the thrust bearing are analyzed. The pressure contour and speed distribution are obtained inside the clearance, as well as the volume fraction of the gas phase at the end face. Finally, according to the analysis results, the optimum structural parameter for the herringbone spiral groove structure is proposed, which enables higher bearing stability and provides a reference for engineering practice.

In the defect diagnosis of the gear-shaft-bearing system with compound defects, the generated vibration signals are complicated. In addition, the information acquired by a single sensor is easily affected by uncertain factors, and low diagnostic accuracy is caused when traditional defect diagnosis methods are used, which cannot meet the high-precision diagnosis requirements. Therefore, a method is developed to identify the defect types and defect degrees of the gear-shaft-bearing system efficiently. In this method, the vibration signals are collected using multiple sensors, the dual-tree complex wavelet and the optimal weighting factor (OWF) methods are used for the data layer fusion, and the preprocessing is realized through wavelet transform and FFT. A learning model based on two-stream CNN composed of 1D-CNN and 2D-CNN is established, and the obtained wavelet time-frequency map and FFT spectrum are used as the input. Then, the trained features from the output of the connected layer are classified by the SVM. Compared with the OWF-1DCNN and OWF-2DCNN models, the time consumption of the OWF-TSCNN model is increased by 14.5%–26.6%, and the convergence speed of the network is decreased. However, its accuracy reaches 100% and 99.83% in the training set and test set, and the loss entropy and over-fitting rate are also greatly reduced. The feature extraction ability and generalization ability of the OWF-TSCNN model are increased, reaching 100% diagnosis accuracy on different defect types and defect degrees, which is more suitable for defect diagnosis of the gear-shaft-bearing system.

For the analysis on the deformation of flexible ring gears in spur gear pairs, the complete flexible ring is discretized, and the boundary condition is added to the connecting points to develop a calculation method for the flexible deformation. The ovality index is used to describe the deformation degree of flexible ring gears, then the influences of ring-gear width and the spalling defects on the flexible deformation of ring gears are discussed. The result shows that the flexible deformation of ring gears is caused by the gear pair meshing force, and the deformed shape is close to an ellipse. In the single-tooth meshing interval of gear pairs, the main form of deformation is being stretched, and while in the double-tooth meshes, the main form is bending deformation. When the width of the ring gear rims is increased, the flexible deformation of the ring gears can be effectively suppressed, and the vibration amplitude of the gear pairs can be reduced. Additionally, when there is a localized spalling fault on gear pairs, the sudden changes in the deformation of flexible ring gears are generated by the shock of the meshing force. Finally, through the finite element analysis model and the experiment, the mathematical model of gear pairs with flexible rings is confirmed.

The fault diagnosis of the gearbox is primarily based on the analysis of the harmonic response. However, the generation mechanism of the harmonic response of the gear pair is still not distinctly explained in a healthy gearbox. Therefore, this paper is dedicated to establishing a dynamic model of the gearbox for this issue. In this model, the contact force of the bearing and the meshing stiffness of the gear pair are determined by the Hertz theory and the potential energy method, then the shaft motion is used as the connection to establish the coupling relationship between the gear pair and the bearing. After this dynamic model is confirmed by experiments and existing models, the coupling relationship inside the gearbox and the harmonic response of the gear pair are studied using this model. The result demonstrates that a closed control loop is formed due to the vibration transmission between the gear pair, the bearing and the shaft, and there is a strong coupled vibration between the gear pair and the bearing in the gearbox. Due to the generation of the center distance error, misalignment angle and disorganized meshing process of the gear pair, the meshing stiffness is altered, which excites the harmonic response of the gear pair. When the speed of the gearbox is increased, although the vibration amplitude of the gearbox is increased, the system predominantly vibrates at the fundamental frequency, and the harmonic of the gear pair is also shifted to the low frequency band.