Acoustic Emissions and Monitoring Bearing Health©

摘要

Acoustic emission (AE) was originally developed for nondestructiverntesting of static structures, however, over the years itsrnapplication has been extended to health monitoring of rotatingrnmachines and bearings. It offers the advantage of earlier defectrndetection in comparison to vibration analysis. Current methodologiesrnof applying AE for bearing diagnosis are reviewed. Therninvestigation reported in this paper was centered on the applicationrnof standard acoustic emissions (AE) characteristic parametersrnon a radially loaded bearing. An experimental test-rig wasrndesigned to allow seeded defects on the inner and outer race. It isrnconcluded that irrespective of the radial load, rotational speedrnand high levels of background noise, simple AE parameters suchrnas r.m.s and AE counts provided an indication of bearing defect.rnIn addition to validating already established AE techniques, thisrninvestigation focuses on establishing an appropriate thresholdrnlevel for AE counts.