Blade crack detection of centrifugal fan using adaptive stochastic resonance

Abstract

Centrifugal fans are widely used in various industries as a kind of turbo machinery. Among the components of the centrifugal fan, the impeller is a key part because it is used to transform kinetic energy into pressure energy. Crack in impeller's blades is one of the serious hidden dangers. It is important to detect the cracks in the blades as early as possible. Based on blade vibration signals, this research applies an adaptive stochastic resonance (ASR) method to diagnose crack fault in centrifugal fan. The ASR method, which can utilize the optimization ability of the grid search method and adaptively realize the optimal stochastic resonance system matching input signals, may weaken the noise and highlight weak characteristic and thus can diagnose the fault accurately. A centrifugal fan test rig is established and experiments with three cases of blades are conducted. In comparison with the ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) analysis and the traditional Fourier transform method, the experiment verified the effectiveness of the current method in blade crack detection.