A comparative study of the effectiveness of vibration and acoustic emission in diagnosing a defective bearing in a planetry gearbox

The present study is aimed to reduce the effect of background noise whilst extracting the fault feature from AE and vibration signatures. This has been achieved through developing of internal AE sensor for helicopter transmission system. In addition, series of signal processing procedure has been developed to improved detection of incipient damage. Three signal processing techniques including an adaptive filter, spectral kurtosis and envelope analysis, were applied to AE and vibration data acquired from a simplified planetary gearbox test rig with a seeded bearing defect. The results show that AE identified the defect earlier than vibration analysis irrespective of the tortuous transmission path.