Gearbox vibration monitoring using extended Kalman filters and hypothesis tests

The efficiency of many maintenance programs is heavily dependent on the detection accuracy of the condition monitoring system. Condition indicators that are sensitive to environmental or operational variables of no interest will inevitably reflect irrelevant fluctuations and thus mislead the subsequent analysis. In consideration of this phenomenon, a fully automatic and robust vibration monitoring system for gearboxes is proposed in this study. The primary objective here is on how to exclude the effects of variable load conditions. The proposed technique features a number of appealing advantages, which include extended Kalman filter-based time-varying autoregressive modeling, automatic autoregressive model order selection with the aid of a non-paired two-sample Satterthwaite's t'-test, a highly effective and robust condition indicator (the means of one-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov goodness-of-fit test), and an automatic alert generating mechanism for incipient gear faults with the aid of a Wilcoxon rank-sum test. Two sets of entire lifetime gearbox vibration monitoring data with distinct variable load conditions were used for experimental validation. The proposed condition indicator was compared with other well-known and/or recently proposed condition indicators. The results demonstrate excellent performance of the proposed technique in four aspects: the effectiveness of identifying the optimum model order, a minimum number of false alerts. constant behavior under variable load conditions, and to some extent an early alert for incipient gear faults. Furthermore, the proposed condition indicator can be directly employed by condition-based maintenance programs as a condition covariate for operational maintenance decision analysis. It provides a quantitative and more efficient means for exchanging condition information with maintenance programs in comparison with the widely used non-parametric time-frequency techniques such as wavelets, which rely on visual inspection. (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd.