A Machine Learning Vibration-Based Methodology for Robust Detection and Severity Characterization of Gear Incipient Faults Under Variable Working Speed and Load

A machine learning (ML) methodology for the robust detection and severity characterization of incipient gear faults under variable speed and load is postulated. The methodology is trained using vibration signals from a single accelerometer mounted on the gearbox, simultaneously acquired with tachometer signals at a sample of working conditions (WCs) from the range of interest. A special parametric identification procedure of gearbox dynamics that may account for the continuous range of WCs is introduced through ‘clouds’ of advanced stochastic data-driven Functionally Pooled models, estimated from angularly resampled vibration signals. Each cloud represents the gearbox dynamics at a specific fault severity level, while the pseudo-static effects of the WCs on the dynamics are accounted for through data pooling. Fault detection and severity characterization are achieved by testing the consistency of a vibration signal with each model cloud within a hypothesis testing framework in which the unknown load is also estimated. The methodology is assessed through 18,300 experiments on a single-stage spur gearbox including four incipient single-tooth pinion faults, 61 speeds, and four load levels. The faults produce no significant changes in the time-domain signals, while their frequency-domain effects overlap with the variations caused by the WCs, rendering the diagnosis problem highly challenging. The comparison with a state-of-the-art deep Stacked Autoencoder (SAE) demonstrates the ML method’s superior performance, achieving 95.4% and 91.6% accuracy in fault detection and characterization, respectively.