An algorithm to diagnose ball bearing faults in servomotors running arbitrary motion profiles

摘要

This paper describes a procedure to extend the scope of classical methods to detect ball bearing faults (based on envelope analysis and fault frequencies identification) beyond their usual area of application. The objective of this procedure is to allow condition based monitoring of such bearings in servomotor applications, where typically the motor in its normal mode of operation has to follow a non-constant angular velocity profile that may contain motion inversions. After describing and analyzing the algorithm from a theoretical point of view, experimental results obtained on a real industrial application are presented and commented.