Phenomenological vibration models of planetary gearboxes for gear local fault diagnosis

Planetary gearboxes (PGs) are prone to gear local faults, such as cracking, pitting, and spalling, because of their difficult working environment. These faults may lead to significant capital losses and catastrophic events. Numerous phenomenological modulation models of vibration signals of PGs have been proposed for diagnosis purposes. However, local fault diagnosis remains extremely challenging due to two aspects: (1) Most vibration modulation models cannot reflect the local fault-induced pulse modulation characteristic. (2) Studies on local fault characteristic frequencies (LFCFs) of gears lack a unified mechanism explanation. To solve these problems, an improved phenomenological vibration model of a gear pair with local fault is first proposed. This model can reflect the pulse modulation characteristic. Then, relative phases between multiple gear pairs in the PG are calculated based on a modified phase model. Based on these, phenomenological vibration models of PGs with/without local faults are established, spectral structures are derived using Fourier series analysis, and LFCFs are deduced for local fault diagnosis. Simulation and experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed models, which exhibit higher descriptive capability than traditional models.