The online vibration based condition monitoring of an air cooled condenser fan gearbox at a coal fired power station is considered in this paper. These fans force air through the condensers as part of the thermodynamic steam cycle and operate at high load factors. Because a power generation unit requires a high number of these fans (typically 48), the corresponding maintenance cost and unit capability factor implications make the reliability of the driving gearboxes crucial. Following a number of premature failures of these gearboxes at the power station under consideration, it is now sought to identify the root cause for corrective action while taking load variation into account. As such, three adjacent gearboxes were instrumented and monitored over a period of more than two years. In this paper, several advanced signal processing techniques are evaluated to facilitate early detection and qualification of damage of one of these gearboxes.
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