Microphone array for non-contact monitoring of rolling bearings

Abstract

A non-contact approach for detection of lubrication loss in ball bearings is described in the paper. An acoustic camera consisting of array of microphones and camera is used for measuring bearing noise. It is found that the lubrication loss increases the obtained sound pressure from 3 to 33 dB, in the frequency range 10 Hz– 20 kHz. Automatic detection of the lubrication loss may be done by a thresholding technique.