Elsevier

Measurement

Volume 48, February 2014, Pages 292-305
Measurement

Review
Condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes: A review

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.measurement.2013.11.012Get rights and content

Abstract

Planetary gearboxes significantly differ from fixed-axis gearboxes and exhibit unique behaviors, which invalidate fault diagnosis methods working well for fixed-axis gearboxes. Much work has been done for condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of fixed-axis gearboxes, while studies on planetary gearboxes are not that many. However, we still notice that a number of publications on condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes have appeared in academic journals, conference proceedings and technical reports. This paper aims to review and summarize these publications and provide comprehensive references for researchers interested in this topic. The structures of a planetary gearbox as well as a fixed-axis one are briefly introduced and contrasted. The unique behaviors and fault characteristics of planetary gearboxes are identified and analyzed. Investigations on condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes are summarized based on the adopted methodologies. Finally, open problems are discussed and potential research topics are pointed out.

Introduction

Thanks to the advantages of large transmission ratio and strong load-bearing capacity, planetary (also called epicyclic) gearboxes are widely used in aerospace, automotive and heavy industry applications such as helicopters, wind turbines, and heavy trucks [1], [2]. Planetary gearboxes generally operate under tough working environment. Their key components, for example, gears and bearings, are subject to damage modes such as fatigue crack and pitting [3]. A failure of planetary gearboxes may cause shutdown of the entire train and result in major economic losses and even human casualties. Condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes aims to prevent accidents and generate cost savings for users of planetary gearboxes.

Condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of gearboxes has been attracting considerably increasing attention [4], [5], [6]. Most investigations, however, focus on fixed-axis gearboxes in which all gears are designed to rotate around their own fixed centers [7], [8], [9], [10] (see Fig. 1). Fundamentally different from fixed-axis gearboxes, planetary gearboxes refer to those including the transmission structure of planetary gear sets. An elementary planetary gear set, shown in Fig. 2a, is a compound gear system. The gear system contains a ring gear, a sun gear that rotates around its own center, and several planet gears that not only rotate around their own centers but also revolve around the center of the sun gear. With such a complex gear transmission structure, planetary gearboxes exhibit some unique behaviors, which invalidate fault diagnosis methods working well for fixed-axis gearboxes.

Compared with fixed-axis gearboxes, studies on condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes are not that many. However, they have grown at a rapid rate in recent years. Many publications on these studies appear every year in academic journals, conference proceedings and technical reports. In 2005, Samuel and Pines [11] thoroughly reviewed vibration-based diagnostic techniques for helicopter transmissions which contain a planetary gearbox, while a review specifically focusing on fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes has not been reported yet based on the authors’ literature search.

This paper aims to summarize and survey the research and development of condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes. It attempts to synthesize the individual pieces of information on this topic in context, therefore providing a comprehensive reference for researchers and helping them develop advanced research topics in this area. The survey is presented in terms of different methodologies used in fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes, namely, modeling, signal processing and intelligent diagnosis.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly compares the transmission structures of planetary gearboxes and fixed-axis ones, and identifies the unique behaviors and fault characteristics of planetary gearboxes. Section 3 reviews the publications on fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes according to the used methodologies. Section 4 provides a summary by synthesizing the publications in a table and points out existing essential problems in reported research work. Section 5 describes prospects and identifies future research directions in this area. Concluding remarks are drawn in Section 6.

Section snippets

Transmission structures and operation behaviors

In this subsection, the transmission diagram of a fixed-axis gearbox containing two meshing pairs is given in Fig. 1 first before introducing that of a planetary gearbox. It is observed from Fig. 1 that all gears of the two meshing pairs rotate only around their own fixed centers. Gearboxes including only this kind of gear transmission structures are defined as fixed-axis ones accordingly.

In contrast, a planetary gear set have several planet gears which rotate around unfixed centers. As shown

Review of condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes

To deal with the challenging issues in condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes, researchers have carried out numerous investigations and produced many publications in academic journals, conference proceedings and technical reports. Especially in recent years, publications on this research topic have increased at a rapid rate. A review on these publications will be presented in this section based on the adopted methodologies, i.e. modeling, signal processing and

Discussions on the state of the art

In Section 3, we have summarized many studies on condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes. A summary including all the literature in this area, however, is impossible and omission of some publications is inevitable since the literature on this research topic is numerous and diverse. We also notice that some publications relevant to this topic are written in other languages. Non-English publications, however, are not considered in this review because of the limitation of

Prospects

Aiming at the open research problems discussed in Section 4, the authors suggest the following prospects for consideration in future research of fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes.

  • (1)

    Since the majority of the models constructed already simulate the healthy condition of planetary gearboxes, more models involving different fault modes and different damage levels, and considering varying working conditions need to be developed. By the use of these models, the relations between the response of the

Concluding remarks

A review on condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes is presented in this paper. In the review, the complex structure of gear transmissions and the unique behaviors of planetary gearboxes are introduced and illustrated. Then, the reported literature on condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes is surveyed and summarized in terms of the used methodologies, such as modeling, signal processing, and intelligent diagnosis. Finally, open issues in this

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (51005172 and 51222503), New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-11-0421), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Provincial Natural Science Foundation research project of Shaanxi (2013JQ7011) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2012jdgz01).

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