Operational Transfer Path Analysis applied to a small gearbox test set-up

摘要

Operational Transfer Path Analysis (OTPA) is very attractive from a practical point of view, as it not requires an expensive measurement campaign in which transfer functions are measured, as is the case in the traditional Transfer Path Analysis (TPA). Instead, transmissibilities are measured from operational data, making the method relatively cheap in terms of measurement efforts. In practice, however, a lot of difficulties have to be overcome in order to obtain reliable path estimates.In this paper the Operational Transfer Path Analysis (OTPA) technique is applied to a small gearbox. Laboratory experiments are presented, discussing the use of singular value decomposition to determine the number of physicaltransmission paths involved, the development of verification checks, and finally the application of OTPA to estimate the strengths of the transmission paths. A comparison with the classical Transfer Path Analysis (TPA) will be included as well. Shortcomings of both the OTPA and TPA method are discussed and conclusions are drawn fromthe experiments.