Fault Diagnosis of Sun Gear in Planetary Gearbox: A Comparative Study

Planetary gearbox could provide considerable transmission ratio in a small casing. Usually, planetary stage works under heavy loads. Gears inside planetary gearbox may suffer from damages including pitting, spalling and tooth broken. Sun gear fault diagnosis is a challenge since sun gear is in the center of the planetary gearbox. To address fault diagnosis of sun gear, a method named continuous vibration separation is presented in this paper. The method is compared with MED, which is a impulsive signal enhancement method. Fault seeded experiment is conducted to validate the method. Signal analysis result indicates that a combination of CVS and MED is more effective.