The planetary gearbox is at the heart of most rotating machinery. The premature failure and subsequent downtime of a planetary gearbox not only seriously affects the reliability and safety of the entire rotating machinery but also results in severe accidents and economic losses in industrial applications. It is an important and challenging task to accurately detect failures in a planetary gearbox at an early stage to ensure the safety and reliability of the mechanical transmission system. In this paper, a novel method based on wavelet packet energy (WPE) and modulation signal bispectrum (MSB) analysis is proposed for planetary gearbox early fault diagnostics. First, the vibration signal is decomposed into different time-frequency subspaces using wavelet packet decomposition (WPD). The WPE is calculated in each time-frequency subspace. Secondly, the relatively high energy vectors are selected from a WPE matrix to obtain a reconstructed signal. The reconstructed signal is then subjected to MSB analysis to obtain the fault characteristic frequency for fault diagnosis of the planetary gearbox. The validity of the proposed method is carried out through analyzing the vibration signals of the test planetary gearbox in two fault cases. One fault is a chipped sun gear tooth and the other is an inner-race fault in the planet gear bearing. The results show that the proposed method is feasible and effective for early fault diagnosis in planetary gearboxes.

In the motor current signal, the characteristic frequency of broken rotor bar (BRB) fault is modulated by the supply frequency and it decreases with the decrease of the load, resulting it to be easily buried under light load conditions. Teager-Kaiser energy operator (TKEO) has shown better performance to detect BRB faults than classical methods, such as envelope and spectral analysis. However, the original definition of TKEO leads to its result lack of physical meanings and the causal processing in TKEO can lead to phase distortion and non-ideal filter characteristics. Therefore, this paper proposes a normalized frequency domain energy operator (FDEO) for the BRB fault diagnosis, which does not require causal processing and calculates multiple differentiations in the frequency domain with equal accuracy in one operation. Furthermore, normalized FDEO removes the influence of the supply frequency followed by spectral analysis to extract fault features. The mathematical model of induction motor under healthy and faulty condition are studied in this article. Then, the proposed approach is experimentally validated with seeded one and two BRB faults operating under various load conditions. To verify the effectiveness, the results are compared with TKEO, envelope and spectral analysis. It was found that the proposed method provides slightly obvious fault features with respect to TKEO, especially when the IMs run under light load conditions with two BRB faults.

Induction motors (IMs) play an essential role in the field of various industrial applications. Long-time service and tough working situations make IMs become prone to a broken rotor bar (BRB) that is one of the major causes of IMs faults. Hence, the continuous condition monitoring of BRB faults demands a computationally efficient and accurate signal diagnosis technique. The advantage of high reliability and wide applicability in condition monitoring and fault diagnosis based on vibration signature analysis results in an improved cyclic modulation spectrum (CMS), which is one of the cyclic spectral analysis algorithms. CMS is proposed in this paper for the detection and identification of BRB faults in IMs at a steady-state operation based on a vibration signature analysis. The application of CMS is based on the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and the improved CMS approach is attributed to the optimization of STFT. The optimal window is selected to improve the accuracy for identifying the BRB fault types and severities. The appropriate window length and step size are optimized based on the selected window function to receive a better calculation benefit through simulation and experimental analysis. Compared to other estimators, the improved CMS method provides better fault detectability results by analyzing vertical vibration signatures of a healthy motor, and damaged motors with 1 BRB and 2 BRBs under 0%, 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% load conditions. Both synthetic and experimental investigations demonstrate the proposed methodology can significantly reduce computational costs and identify the BRB fault types and severities effectively.

Induction motors (IMs) are widely used in many manufacturing processes and industrial applications. The harsh work environment, long-time enduring, and overloads mean that it is subjected to broken rotor bar (BRB) faults. The vibration signal of IMs with BRB faults consists of the reliable modulation information used for fault diagnosis. Cyclostationary analysis has been found to be effective in identifying and extracting fault feature. The estimators of cyclic modulation spectrum (CMS) and fast spectral correlation (FSC) based on the short-time fourier transform (STFT) have higher cyclic frequency resolution, which has proven efficient in demodulating second order cyclostationary (CS2) signals. However, these two estimators have limitations of processing the maximum cyclic frequency α_max that is smaller than Fs/2 (Fs is the sampling frequency) according to Nyquist’s Theorem. In addition, they have lower carrier frequency resolution due to the fixed window size used in STFT. In order to resolve the initial shortcomings of the CMS and FSC methods, in this paper, we extended the analysis of CMS algorithm based on the continuous wavelet transform (CWT), which enlarged the maximum cyclic frequency range to Fs/2 and provides higher carrier frequency resolution because the CWT has the advantage of multi-resolution analysis. The reliability and applicability of the proposed method for fault components localization were validated by CS2 simulation signals. Compared to CMS and FSC methods, the proposed approach shows better performance by analyzing vibration signals between healthy motor and faulty motor with one BRB fault under 0%, 20%, 40%, and 80% load conditions.

Broken rotor bar (BRB) faults are one of the most common faults in induction motors (IM). One or more broken bars can reduce the performance and efficiency of the IM and hence waste the electrical power and decrease the reliability of the whole mechanical system. This paper proposes an effective fault diagnosis method using the Teager–Kaiser energy operator (TKEO) for BRB faults detection based on the motor current signal analysis (MCSA). The TKEO is investigated and applied to remove the main supply component of the motor current for accurate fault feature extraction, especially for an IM operating at low load with low slip. Through sensing the estimation of the instantaneous amplitude (IA) and instantaneous frequency (IF) of the motor current signal using TKEO, the fault characteristic frequencies can be enhanced and extracted for the accurate detection of BRB fault severities under different operating conditions. The proposed method has been validated by simulation and experimental studies that tested the IMs with different BRB fault severities to consider the effectiveness of the proposed method. The obtained results are compared with those obtained using the conventional envelope analysis methods and showed that the proposed method provides more accurate fault diagnosis results and can distinguish the BRB fault types and severities effectively, especially for operating conditions with low loads.