Citation:
Morhain, A. Mba, D. Bearing defect diagnosis and acoustic emission. Proceedings
of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part J, Journal of Engineering
Tribology, Vol. 217, No. 4, pp 275-272
Abstract:
Acoustic emission (AE) was originally developed for non-destructive testing of
static structures, however, over the years its application has been extended to
health monitoring of rotating machines and bearings. It offers the advantage of
earlier defect detection in comparison to vibration analysis. However,
limitations in the successful application of AE technique for monitoring
bearings have been partly due to thedifficulty in processing, interpreting and
classifying the acquired data. The investigation reported in this paper was
centered on the application of standard acoustic emissions (AE) characteristic
parameters on a radially loaded bearing. An experimental test-rig was modified
such that defects could be seeded onto the inner and outer races of a test
bearing. As the test-rig was adapted for this purpose it offered high background
acoustic emission noise providing a realistic test for fault diagnosis. In
addition to a review of current diagnostic methods for applying AE to bearing
diagnosis, the results of this investigation validated the use of r.m.s,
amplitude, energy and AE counts for diagnosis. Furthermore, this study
determined the most appropriate threshold level for AE count diagnosis, the
first known attempt.
