In recent years, acoustic emission (AE) sensors and AE-based techniques have been developed and tested for gearbox fault diagnosis. In general, AE-based techniques require much higher sampling rates than vibration analysis-based techniques for gearbox fault diagnosis. Therefore, it is questionable whether an AE-based technique would give a better or at least the same performance as the vibration analysis-based techniques using the same sampling rate. To answer the question, this paper presents a comparative study for gearbox tooth damage level diagnostics using AE and vibration measurements, the first known attempt to compare the gearbox fault diagnostic performance of AE- and vibration analysis-based approaches using the same sampling rate. Partial tooth cut faults are seeded in a gearbox test rig and experimentally tested in a laboratory. Results have shown that the AE-based approach has the potential to differentiate gear tooth damage levels in comparison with the vibration-based approach. While vibration signals are easily affected by mechanical resonance, the AE signals show more stable performance.

This paper deals with gear pitting fault diagnosis problem and presents a method by integrating convolutional neural network (CNN) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) networks with vibration and acoustic emission signals to solve the problem. The presented method first trains a one-dimensional CNN with acoustic emission signals and a GRU network with vibration signals. Then the gear pitting fault features obtained by the two networks are concatenated to form a deep learning structure for gear pitting fault diagnosis. Seven different gear pitting conditions are used to test the feasibility of the presented method. The diagnosis result of the gear pitting fault shows that the accuracy of the presented method reaches above 98% with only a relatively small number of training samples. In comparison with the results using CNN or GRU network alone, the presented method gives more accurate diagnosis results. By comparing the results of different loads and learning rates, the robustness of the presented method for gear pitting fault diagnosis is proved. Moreover, the presented deep structure can be easily extended to more other sensor input signals for gear pitting fault diagnosis in the future.

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In recent years, research on gear pitting fault diagnosis has been conducted. Most of the research has focused on feature extraction and feature selection process, and diagnostic models are only suitable for one working condition. To diagnose early gear pitting faults under multiple working conditions, this article proposes to develop a domain adaptation diagnostic model–based improved deep neural network and transfer learning with raw vibration signals. A particle swarm optimization algorithm and L2 regularization are used to optimize the improved deep neural network to improve the stability and accuracy of the diagnosis. When using the domain adaptation diagnostic model for fault diagnosis, it is necessary to discriminate whether the target domain (test data) is the same as the source domain (training data). If the target domain and the source domain are consistent, the trained improved deep neural network can be used directly for diagnosis. Otherwise, the transfer learning is combined with improved deep neural network to develop a deep transfer learning network to improve the domain adaptability of the diagnostic model. Vibration signals for seven gear types with early pitting faults under 25 working conditions collected from a gear test rig are used to validate the proposed method. It is confirmed by the validation results that the developed domain adaptation diagnostic model has a significant improvement in the adaptability of multiple working conditions.

The localized failures of gears introduce cyclic-transient impulses in the measured gearbox vibration signals. These impulses are usually identified from the sidebands around gear-mesh harmonics through the spectral analysis of cyclo-stationary signals. However, in practice, several high-powered applications of gearboxes like wind turbines are intrinsically characterized by nonstationary processes that blur the measured vibration spectra of a gearbox and deteriorate the efficacy of spectral diagnostic methods. Although order-tracking techniques have been proposed to improve the performance of spectral diagnosis for nonstationary signals measured in such applications, the required hardware for the measurement of rotational speed of these machines is often unavailable in industrial settings. Moreover, existing tacho-less order-tracking approaches are usually limited by the high time-frequency resolution requirement, which is a prerequisite for the precise estimation of the instantaneous frequency. To address such issues, a novel fault-signature enhancement algorithm is proposed that can alleviate the spectral smearing without the need of rotational speed measurement. This proposed tacho-less diagnostic technique resamples the measured acceleration signal of the gearbox based on the optimal warping path evaluated from the fast dynamic time-warping algorithm, which aligns a filtered shaft rotational harmonic signal with respect to a reference signal assuming a constant shaft rotational speed estimated from the approximation of operational speed. The effectiveness of this method is validated using both simulated signals from a fixed-axis gear pair under nonstationary conditions and experimental measurements from a 750-kW planetary wind turbine gearbox on a dynamometer test rig. The results