Seeded fault detection on helical gears with acoustic emission

Acoustic emission (AE) is one of many technologies for health monitoring and diagnosis of rotating machines such as gearboxes. Although significant research has been undertaken in understanding the potential of AE in monitoring gearboxes this has been solely applied to spur gears. This report presents an experimental investigation that assesses the effectiveness of AE in identifying seeded defects on helical gears; the first known attempt. Additionally vibration analysis has performed to study the effect of seeded defect on the vibration signature of the meshing gears.