Health State Indicator-Based Vibration Signature for Gearbox Condition Monitoring and Maintenance

Gearbox is a device used to transmit the power of rotating machinery from the prime mover to the equipment with or without change in rotational speed. The working condition of gearbox is usually experienced in heavy load, suffering high friction when contacted with pinion and running in high speed rotation. Therefore, the condition of gearbox must be reliable to ensure the functional operation. The present study deals with development of health state indicator derived from vibration signature for gearbox condition monitoring and maintenance. Vibration technique is still the best way to machine condition monitoring including gearbox. However, wear detection of gearbox is still under study due to the difficulties of capturing best signature of wear by means of vibration signal. In this study, health state indicator is proposed based on vibration signature to monitor wear progress in gearbox thru averaged and moving-averaged logarithmic ratio from filtered vibration signal. The results show that averaged logarithmic ratio is increased as well as the increasing of wear based on experimental work. Moving-averaged logarithmic ratio is also investigated in present work and both method has potential to be indicators for wear monitoring and detection.