Fault Diagnosis of Industrial Gear Hobbing Machine

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop a fault diagnosis algorithm by vibrational analysis for an industrial gear hobbing machine. Gear Hobbing is the most dominant and profitable process for manufacturing high quality gears. In order to sustain the market competition gear manufacturers, need to produce high quality gears with minimum possible cost. However, catastrophic failures do occur in gear hobbing process which causes unexpected machine down time and revenue loss. These failures can be avoided by using condition monitoring approaches. In the proposed approach vibration data during different faults such as lubrication error, excessive feed rate, loose bearing error is collected from an industrial gear hobbing machine using three axis MEMS accelerometer. The collected data is analyzed and classified with spectral kurtosis and Dynamic Time Warping algorithm. The efficiency of the proposed approach is 90 percent as determined by experimental results. The proposed approach can provide a low-cost solution for predictive maintenance for gear hobbing industries..