An Integrated Fault Diagnosis Method of Gearboxes Using Oil Analysis and Vibration Analysis

Nowadays, oil analysis and vibration analysis are the two main condition monitoring and fault diagnosis techniques for gearboxes maintenance. In practice, these two techniques are usually used independently, and can only find about 40% of faults when used separately which usually cause missed hits and false alarms. If we can integrate the two faults information, more reliable diagnosis results will be obtained. In this paper, a test rig driving by an electric motor was set up to examine the correlation between vibration signals and oil analysis data. In experimentation procedure, oil samples and vibration signals were collected regularly and the characteristic parameters based on oil analysis and vibration analysis were calculated by using the effective algorithms. Finally, we use D-S theory of evidence as the information fusion method to integrate oil analysis information and vibration analysis information of a gearbox. The results prove that the method integrating oil analysis and vibration analysis is applicable and available in condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of gearboxes.