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Rotating machinery such as induction motors and gears driven by shafts are widely used in industry. A variety of techniques have been employed over the past several decades for fault detection and identification in such machinery. However, there is no universally accepted set of practices with comprehensive diagnostic capabilities. This paper presents a new and sensitive approach, to detect faults in rotating machines; based on principal component techniques and residual matrix analysis (PCRMA) of the vibration measured signals. The residual matrix for machinery vibration is extracted using the PCA method, crest factors of this residual matrix is determined and then machinery condition is assessed based on comparing the crest factor amplitude with the base line (healthy) level. PCRMA method has been applied to vibration data sets collected from several kinds of rotating machinery: a wind turbine, a gearbox, and an induction motor. This approach successfully differentiated the signals from healthy system and systems containing gear tooth breakage, cracks in a turbine blade, and phase imbalance in induction motor currents. The achieved results show that the developed method is found very promising and Crest Factors levels were found very sensitive for machinery condition.

Vibration signals measured from a gearbox are complex multicomponent signals, generated by tooth meshing, gear shaft rotation, gearbox resonance vibration signatures, and a substantial amount of noise. This paper presents a novel scheme for extracting gearbox fault features using adaptive filtering techniques for enhancing condition features, meshing frequency sidebands. A modified least mean square (LMS) algorithm is examined and validated using only one accelerometer, instead of using two accelerometers in traditional arrangement, as the main signal and a desired signal is artificially generated from the measured shaft speed and gear meshing frequencies. The proposed scheme is applied to a signal simulated from gearbox frequencies with a numerous values of step size. Findings confirm that 10−5 step size invariably produces more accurate results and there has been a substantial improvement in signal clarity (better signal-to-noise ratio), which makes meshing frequency sidebands more discernible. The developed scheme is validated via a number of experiments carried out using two-stage helical gearbox for a healthy pair of gears and a pair suffering from a tooth breakage with severity fault 1 (25% tooth removal) and fault 2 (50% tooth removal) under loads (0%, and 80% of the total load). The experimental results show remarkable improvements and enhance gear condition features. This paper illustrates that the new approach offers a more effective way to detect early faults.