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Published in IET Science, Measurement and Technology
Received on 22nd April 2011
Revised on 16th September 2011
doi: 10.1049/iet-smt.2011.0082

ISSN 1751-8822

Empirical mode decomposition of acoustic signals

for diagnosis of faults in gears and rolling
element bearings
M. Amarnath1 I.R. Praveen Krishna2
1

Indian Institute of Information Technology Design and Manufacturing Jabalpur, Jabalpur 482001, India
Machine Design Section, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai 600036,
India
E-mail: amarnath.cmy@gmail.com; amarnath@iiitdm.ac.in

Abstract: Rolling element bearings and gears are the most important components of rotating machines. One of the major causes
of machine down time is because of the failure of these elements. Down time of rotating machines can be reduced by monitoring
vibration and acoustic behaviour of machine elements. This study describes the application of the empirical mode decomposition
(EMD) method to diagnose the faults in rolling element bearings and helical gears. By using EMD, a complicated signal can be
decomposed into a number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) based on the local characteristic timescale of the signal. The IMFs
reveal the intrinsic oscillation modes embedded in the signal. Acoustic signals acquired from the bearings and gears have been
decomposed and kurtosis values are extracted from these IMFs to quantify various faults. Results demonstrate the advantages of
EMD method to detect the faults in the early stage.

Introduction

Condition monitoring of rolling element bearings and gears

has received considerable attention for many years, because
majority of the problems in rotating machines are caused by
faulty bearings or gears. It is widely accepted that incipient
faults in rotating machine elements (gears and bearings) can
be detected by monitoring vibration and/or sound signals.
Advancements in signal processing techniques and
computing capabilities have enabled vibration/acoustic
signals monitoring to play an important role in condition
monitoring of critical components in complicated rotating
machines [1 3].
Anantapadmanaban and Radhakrishnan [4] carried out
experiments to study the effect of surface irregularities in
rolling and sliding contacts on noise generation. The results
showed that there is an increase in the overall noise level of
the system with increase in roughness. When a ne surface
wears, noise level increases and when a rough surface
wears, noise level reduces; hence monitoring of overall
noise level and discrete frequency patterns provide an
indication of the surface condition of contacting pair. Heng
and Nor [5] presented a study on the application of sound
pressure and vibration signals to detect the presence of
defects in rolling element bearings using the statistical
parameter analysis method. A well-established statistical
parameters such as crest factor and distribution of moments
including kurtosis and skewness as well as other parameters
obtained from beta distribution functions were utilised in
this study. Results revealed that kurtosis and crest factor
IET Sci. Meas. Technol., 2012, Vol. 6, Iss. 4, pp. 279287
doi: 10.1049/iet-smt.2011.0082

from both sound and vibration signals provided better

diagnostic information than beta function parameters.
Ramroop et al. [6] presented a comparative study of
conventional vibration and acoustic monitoring techniques
to diagnose defects in industrial multistage gearbox
operating under healthy and faulty conditions. Authors gave
a series of empirically derived best practice guidelines for
the implementation of acoustic condition monitoring and to
assist researchers in subsequent interpretation of gearbox
sound acoustics.
Samanta [7] had suggested mean (m), root mean square
(rms), variance (s2), skewness and kurtosis, which are
known to be sensitive to different degrees of faults.
Amarnath et al. [8] have demonstrated experimentally the
usefulness of time wave form, frequency domain and spike
energy analysis to identify various defects in roller element
bearings. Orhan et al. [9] investigated the faults in ball and
cylindrical roller element bearing of centrifugal pump using
spectral analysis. Exact locations of faults were found based
on the corresponding defect frequencies. Acoustic and
vibration monitoring and analysis become too complex in
the presence of faults though they can be measured easily.
In this context authors were forced to try other techniques
namely short-time Fourier transform, wavelet analysis,
empirical mode decomposition and so on. Parey et al. [10]
carried out both simulation and experimental work to
validate the effectiveness of empirical mode decomposition
(EMD) technique to detect the gear fault severity. Statistical
parameters such as crest factor and kurtosis values of EMD
signal were used to diagnose simulated fault in the gearbox.
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Parey and Tandon [11] presented an analytical model related
to vibration signal to the defect size on the gear tooth ank.
Defect growth was evaluated using rms and kurtosis values
of the decomposed intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) of
vibration signals. It was concluded that EMD-based kurtosis
values provided a better indication of fault as compared
with the kurtosis value of unprocessed vibration signals. Yu
et al. [12] implemented Hilbert Huang transform (HHT)
and its energy distribution in time frequency planes to
diagnose fault in gears. The effectiveness of time
frequency entropy based on HHT signals was highlighted in
their work. Loutridis [13] studied the effectiveness of the
EMD method in spur gear fault diagnosis. The defect
analysis was done comparing the energies of IMFs, which
exhibits high sensitivity to gear damage. Yan and Gao [14]
applied the HHT technique for machinery health
monitoring. Authors have introduced analytical background
of HHT, its effectiveness is experimentally evaluated using
vibration signals measured on test bearings. It was found
that the HHT was particularly suited for capturing transient
events in dynamic system such as propagation of structural
defects in a rolling bearing. Gao et al. [15] introduced a
combined mode function (CMF) along with EMD methods
to diagnose faults in a high-pressure cylinder of a power
generator in a thermal power plant. Authors have discussed
the drawbacks of EMD. Experimental results showed the
advantages of CMF over EMD in fault diagnosis.
Tekiner and Yesilyurt [16] carried out experiments to
determine the best suitable machining conditions using
statistical values of sound signals. Their work highlighted
the inuence of sound signal to examine the machining
process parameters viz. ank wear, surface roughness, chip
morphology and built-up edge formation. In this work
kurtosis parameter value was not considered because of
susceptibility of kurtosis to high-frequency acoustic signals
released during the machining process. Heng and Nor [5]
have conducted experimental investigations to detect the
presence of defects in rolling element bearing using
statistical parameters. Authors have concluded that the
kurtosis values have failed to discriminate different defects
at higher speeds. This drawback is because of the
susceptibility of kurtosis parameter to spurious effect of
noise.
Statistical moments are the descriptors of shape of the
amplitude distribution of vibration data. It is known that a
normal rolling bearing usually provides a vibration
signature with Gaussian distribution. The fourth normalised
statistical moment, kurtosis is the major diagnostic index
which is widely used for the detection of damaged rolling
element bearing. The main short coming of this method is
its higher susceptibility to spurious effect of noise and highfrequency vibration signals. Based on the fact that, in some
cases, the adverse effect of spurious vibrations on the
values of kurtosis is more than the benet gained from the
higher sensitivity of kurtosis to detect incipient faults in
rolling element bearings, EMD-based kurtosis values are
found to be an alternative statistical parameter to overcome
the aforementioned drawbacks [10, 11, 17]. Very few
studies were carried out on applications of acoustic signal
analysis of rotating machine elements for the detection of
fault severity. In this paper, a fault diagnosis scheme based
on the EMD technique is proposed to detect and diagnose
faults in gear and bearings using acoustic signals. Faults
were simulated in gears and bearings, EMD-based kurtosis
values, crest factor, rms values and skewness values are
used to quantify the severity of faults. Results obtained
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from experimental investigations offer good potential for

the early detection of faults in bearing and geared systems.

Empirical mode decomposition procedure

The EMD is a signal processing technique proposed in 1998

by Huang [18] to extract all the oscillatory modes embedded
in a signal without any requirement of stationary or linearity
of the data. In this method, time series will be decomposed
into a nite set of oscillatory mode functions called IMF.
An IMF is dened as a function that satises the following
conditions.
In the entire dataset, the number of extrema and number of
zero crossings must either be equal or differ at most by one.
At any point, mean value of the envelope dened by local
maxima and envelope dened by local minima is zero.
The IMFs indicate the simple oscillation mode involved in
the signal. In EMD, a sifting process is used to extract the
IMF by following three steps [15].
1. All extrema of the signal is identied, and all the local
maxima are connected by a cubic spline as an envelope.
The procedure is repeated on the local minima to produce
the lower envelope.
2. The mean of the two envelopes is designated as m1 , and
the difference between the signals x(t) and m1 as the rst
component, h1 that is
h1 (t) = x(t) m1 (t)

(1)

If h1 is an IMF, it is considered as the rst IMF of x(t). If h1 is

not an IMF, it is considered as the original signal and the
aforementioned procedure is repeated up to k times until h1k
becomes an IMF and it is designated as c1
c1 = h1k

(2)

3. The rst IMF c1 is separated from x(t) by

x(t) c1 (t) = r1 (t)

(3)

The residue r1 is treated as the original and it is subjected to

the same process to obtain other IMFs c2 , c3 , . . . , cn which
satises
r1 (t) c2 (t) = rn (t)
..
.
rn1 (t) cn (t) = rn (t)

(4)

Adding (3) and (4) leads to

x(t) =

n


ci (t) + rn (t)

(5)

i=1

Then, the signal x(t) is decomposed into n intrinsic modes and

a residue rn .
IMF obtained from the sifting process is shown in Fig. 1.
Further, acoustic signal obtained from the gearbox has been
considered to explain empirical mode decomposition
procedure given in (5). Fig. 2 shows decomposition of
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Table 1 summarises the four fundamental frequencies that
are commonly considered to perform bearing fault detection
using frequency domain analysis. The fundamental
frequencies depend on rolling element geometry and
operating speed. Dimensions and frequencies are given in
Table 2.
The four test conditions investigated are
1.
2.
3.
4.

Healthy bearings
Inner race fault
One defect on outer race
Two defects on outer race

The bearing faults are simulated using electric discharge

machining to introduce pits in the inner and outer races of
bearings. The diameter and depth of the cylindrical pit is
0.7 mm. B&K 4332 accelerometer is stud mounted on the
upper surface of the test bearing housing. This is found to
be the best position, because at this location the signal-tonoise ratio is found to be high. Acoustic signals are
measured using a B&K 4117 microphone which is installed
close to the test bearing. The acoustic signals acquired
using Agilent FFT analyser. Signals are sampled at a
sampling frequency of 16.4 kHz.
The healthy bearing is replaced by defective bearing and
the signals are recorded for all the cases separately, under
the same operating conditions. The characteristic bearing
defect frequencies of inner and outer race are calculated by
(6) and (7), respectively.
3.2

Fig. 1 Sifting process to obtain IMF

a Original acoustic signal
b Upper envelope, lower envelope and mean envelope
c First intrinsic mode function (IMF1)

signal x(t) to obtain rst, second, third and fourth components

that is c1 , c2 , c3 and c4 , respectively, until residue rn(t) is
obtained.

3 Experimental apparatus and fault

simulation
In order to evaluate the efcacy of EMD along with kurtosis
and crest factor values, two machine elements, bearing and
gear are selected. These two are taken because they are
most commonly found machine elements in rotating
machines.
3.1

Case study 1: bearing fault detection

Fig. 3 shows the block diagram of the experimental set-up.

Tests are carried out on four sets of bearings (SKF R7 NB
62) of a motor pump. The motor is operated at a normal
speed of 1200 rpm. Rolling bearing element generally
consists of two rings which are called the outer race way
and the inner race way with a set of rolling elements
rotating in the tracks. Initially, healthy bearing (new
bearing) is xed on the test rig.
IET Sci. Meas. Technol., 2012, Vol. 6, Iss. 4, pp. 279287
doi: 10.1049/iet-smt.2011.0082

Case study 2: gear fault detection

Fig. 4 shows the experimental set-up. The set-up consists of a

5 HP two-stage helical gearbox. The gearbox is driven by a
5.5 HP, three-phase induction motor with a rated speed of
1440 rpm. The speed of the motor is controlled by an
inverter drive and for the present study the motor is
operated at 80 rpm. In other words, the speed of the rst
stage of the gearbox is 80 rpm. With a step-up ratio of 1:15,
the speed of the pinion shaft in the second stage of the
gearbox is 1200 rpm. Table 3 summarises the specications
of the test rig. The pinion is connected to a dc motor
(which is used as generator) to generate 2 kW power, which
is dissipated in a resistor bank. In the case of traditional
dynamo meter, additional torsional vibrations can occur
because of torque uctuations. This is avoided in this case
by using dc motor and resistor bank. Tyre couplings are
tted between the electrical machines and gearbox so that
the backlash in the system can be restricted to the gears.
The motor, gearbox and generator are mounted on I-beams,
which are anchored to a massive concrete block.
Position of the microphone is important in acoustic
measurements. Initially, the measurements are taken at
different distances and directions; nally, the position is set
at a distance of 5.5 cm near the pinion (corresponding to
near eld).
Time-domain averaging method has been widely used for
condition monitoring of rotating machinery to increase the
strength of a vibration/acoustic signal relative to noise
obscuring it. In this method, the time records are averaged
together without any further processing. In the present
experiment, the time-domain signal was obtained after
averaging 16 sets of data, which seemed to be sufcient to
make residual noise negligible. The signals were processed
using an Agilent FFT analyser. This procedure has been
used to acquire signals from the gearbox and bearing test
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Fig. 2 Empirical mode decomposition of acoustic signal x(t) acquired from gearbox test rig

Fig. 3 Experimental set-up

rigs. Figs. 5a and b shows time doamin and frequency spectra

plots of acoustic signals obtained from the gearbox. Gear
mesh frequencies are clearly seen in Fig. 5. Frequency
spectra are obtained after time-domain averaging. Overhaul
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time of a new gearbox is more than a year. It is very

difcult to study the fault detection procedures without
seeded fault trials. Local faults in a gearbox can be
classied into three categories, (a) surface wear spalling, (b)
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Table 1

Defect frequencies of rolling element bearings [19]



n
d
fr 1 + cos a Hz
2
D


n
d
f0 = fr 1 cos a Hz
2
D


 2
D
d
1
fb =
cos a Hz
d
D


f
d
fc = r 1 cos a Hz
D
2
fi =

inner race defect

(6)

outer race defect

(7)

ball defect

(8)

cage defect

(9)

Table 2

Calculated bearing characteristic frequencies for

different faults
average diameter
ball diameter
number of rolling elements
contact angle
inner ring speed
outer ring speed
healthy condition
frequency of inner race fault
frequency of outer race fault

14 mm
4 mm
7
0
0 rpm
1200 rpm
33.3 Hz
149 Hz
84 Hz

Fig. 4 Experimental set-up of two-stage helical gearbox

Details of helical gearbox

number of teeth
speed of shafts
mesh frequency
stepup ratio
contact ratio
overlap ratio
power transmitted

4
4.1

Where, n, fr d, D, a denote the number of rollers in bearing,

rotating frequency of shaft, roller diameter, pitch circle diameter
of bearing and contact angle, respectively

Table 3

gear tooth by grinding operation. Seven conditions of the

gear are investigated such as: healthy gear and gear with six
stages of depth-wise tooth removal that is 0, 10, 20, 40, 60,
80 and 100% tooth removal conditions across the tooth width.
For all operating conditions acoustic signals are acquired
and recorded after proper signal conditioning. The acquired
signals are decomposed using EMD method.

First stage

Second stage

44/13
80 rpm (input)
59 Hz
15
1.51
1.12
5 HP

73/16
1200 rpm (output)
320 Hz
1.87
1.24

cracked tooth and (c) loss of a part of tooth because of

breakage of tooth at root or at a point on working tip
(broken or chipped tooth). There are different methods to
simulate faults in gearboxes. The simplest approach is
partial tooth removal. This simulates the damage because of
breakage at a point on the working tip. This type of fault is
common in many industrial applications [20]. In the present
experiment, depth-wise damage is induced on the helical
IET Sci. Meas. Technol., 2012, Vol. 6, Iss. 4, pp. 279287
doi: 10.1049/iet-smt.2011.0082

Results and discussions

Fault diagnosis of bearings

In the present work, acoustic signals are acquired from

healthy and faulty bearings of a centrifugal pump and twostage helical gearbox with healthy and simulated fault
conditions. The signals are preprocessed using an FFT
analyser.
Figs. 6a c shows envelope spectra for a healthy bearing,
bearing with outer and inner race defects, respectively.
Envelope spectra (Figs. 6b and c) show outer and inner race
defect frequencies at 94 and 150 Hz with higher amplitudes.
Further, various time-domain statistical parameters have
been considered to obtain diagnostic information from the
bearing test rig.
Kurtosis value has been widely used for the detection of
faults in rotating machines as well as cutting tool wear
monitoring in the machining process. Kurtosis increases as
spikiness of vibration increases. However, as the damage
increases the vibration signal becomes random and the
values of kurtosis reduce to more normal bearing-like
levels. Thus, the kurtosis measurement reduces ability to
detect the bearing defect at later stages of damage
development [17].
Statistical parameters viz. kurtosis, crest factor, rms and
skewness values have been extracted from acoustic signals
using the EMD procedure. rms and skewness values reduce
drastically, and hence these vales are not suitable for fault
diagnosis. rms and skewness values are tabulated in
Tables 8 11, respectively, in Appendix. Kurtosis and crest
factor values showed better fault diagnostic information.
Results highlight the advantage of this method to assess
fault growth in bearing and gear test rigs. As discussed in
Section 2, EMD gives IMFs from high to low frequencies.
The bearing acoustic signals are decomposed till they
become monotonic, therefore 12 IMFs are extracted.
Generally, higher harmonic frequencies (c1 c6) contain
fault diagnostic information. The IMFs among c6 c12 are
not considered as they contain low-frequency information.
First, six intrinsic modes (c1 c6) of acoustic signals are
considered for statistical analysis. Table 4 shows kurtosis
values of all six modes, a better fault indication is observed
in fourth mode (c4). Fig. 7 shows the kurtosis values of
acoustic signals and kurtosis values of mode c4 against
healthy and different bearing fault conditions, y-axis shows
kurtosis value of mode c4 and unprocessed acoustic signals,
where as on x-axis 1, 2, 3 and 4 indicate healthy bearing,
inner race defect, outer race defect and two defects on outer
race, respectively.
From Fig. 7 it can be seen that kurtosis value of mode c4 of
acoustic signal is a better fault indicator as compared with
kurtosis values of acoustic signals. This is mainly because it
contains only high-frequency content. Kurtosis values of
acoustic signals for healthy bearing, bearing with inner and
outer race faults are found to be 3.13 3.8 and 4.3,
respectively, but for two faults on outer race case kurtosis
value is 3.6, this value is supposed to be higher than 3.6;
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Fig. 5 Gearbox acoustic signal

a Time domain
b Frequency spectra

Fig. 7 Kurtosis values against bearing defects

hence, kurtosis values of acoustic signals fail to show the

signicant difference. However, kurtosis values of mode c4
show considerable increase in kurtosis values from 3.2,
4.35, 4.569 and 8.392 for healthy, inner race defect, outer
race defect and two defects on outer race, respectively.
Thus, EMD-based kurtosis values exhibit an increasing
trend and are comparatively higher than kurtosis obtained
from acoustic signals. Table 5 shows EMD-based crest factor
values. A similar observation is made in crest factor values.
Fig. 8 shows a plot of crest factor values of fourth mode and
crest factor values of acoustic signals. Fourth mode crest
factor values increase from 3.03, 3.64, 4.8 and 5.4 for
healthy, inner race defect, outer race defect and two defects
on outer race cases, respectively. These values show much
rapid increase for different fault conditions as compared with
those of crest factor values obtained from acoustic signals.
Fig. 6 Envelope spectra

4.2

a Healthy baring
b Outer race defect
c Inner race defect

Fault diagnosis of gears

In the present experiment, seven conditions of gear are

investigated such as: healthy gear and gear with six stages

Table 4 Kurtosis values of IMFs (c1 c6)

Condition

IMF1

IMF2

IMF3

IMF4

IMF5

IMF6

healthy
inner race fault
outer race fault
two defects on outer race

1.891
4.571
1.615
3.522

2.318
2.935
2.638
3.206

3.634
3.5327
2.7142
4.684

3.134
4.358
4.569
8.357

2.911
8.135
15.746
24.067

8.084
4.593
20.324
15.404

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doi: 10.1049/iet-smt.2011.0082

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Table 5 Crest factor values of IMFs (c1 c6)
Condition
healthy
inner race fault
outer race fault
two defects on outer race

IMF1

IMF2

IMF3

IMF4

IMF5

IMF6

2.8674
3.7198
2.2418
3.9473

2.6378
3.3097
5.0235
4.5911

2.9296
3.4503
3.1296
3.5414

3.036
3.643
4.848
5.400

3.7866
4.809
5.2503
5.0817

2.8388
5.5974
6.2849
5.0512

Fig. 8 Crest factor values against bearing defect

of depth-wise tooth removal that is 0, 10, 20, 40, 60, 80 and

100% tooth removal conditions. Gear meshing frequency is
the number of teeth multiplied by the rotational frequency
of the gear. Meshing frequency is one of the potential

sources of noise and vibration in the transmission. In the

present case, the gear mesh frequency is 320 Hz.
Fig. 9 shows acoustic signals of healthy gear and 100%
tooth-removed cases, respectively. The x-axis is time in
seconds and y-axis is sound pressure level in mPa.
Empirical mode decomposition is performed on the
acoustic signals of gear operating under healthy and faulty
conditions. Twelve IMFs are calculated to assess fault
severities in the gearbox. Initially, six intrinsic modes (c1
c6) have been considered to compute the kurtosis values.
Intrinsic modes c7 c12 fall below mesh frequency (320 Hz);
hence, they have been ignored from the analysis. Fig. 10
shows the second mode c2 of acoustic signals for healthy
and 100% tooth removal conditions.
Increase in defect severity increases the transients in timedomain signal, which can be more clearly observed in
Fig. 10b. Generally, higher-frequency IMFs contain fault
diagnostic information for gearboxes/ball bearings, because of
the presence of gear mesh/ball pass frequencies. The selection
of intrinsic mode is important, as it depends on the nature of
the signal under investigation. Kurtosis values of rst six
IMFs (c1 c6) are calculated, a better fault-indicating trend is
observed in the second mode (c2), which corresponds to third

Fig. 9 Acoustic signals in the time domain

a Healthy gear
b 100% Tooth removal

Fig. 10 Mode c2 of acoustic signal for healthy gear 100% tooth removal gear
a Healthy gear
b Faulty gear
IET Sci. Meas. Technol., 2012, Vol. 6, Iss. 4, pp. 279287
doi: 10.1049/iet-smt.2011.0082

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Table 6 Kurtosis values of IMFs (c1 c6)
Condition

IMF1

IMF2

IMF3

IMF4

IMF5

IMF6

healthy
10% fault
20% fault
40% fault
60% fault
80% fault
100% fault

2.8758
2.5236
5.5062
3.1388
3.8703
4.0603
15.373

3.6190
4.1532
4.6262
5.1648
7.3249
11.312
14.201

3.9266
4.8114
8.2421
4.3192
5.0849
8.6602
13.919

2.9368
4.5011
4.216
3.5119
5.4791
2.6945
9.8169

8.373
7.389
7.402
10.648
15.228
3.6359
6.8321

8.3045
9.7972
9.5245
18.411
19.968
6.4138
4.2007

mesh frequency; hence, c2 is considered for further analysis.

Table 6 gives the kurtosis values of the mode c2 .
It can be seen that increase in fault severity increases
kurtosis values in IMF1 and IMF2, and better trend is
observed in IMF2, that is, mode c2 , hence this mode has
been considered as a fault indicator. Kurtosis value of
acoustic signals and kurtosis value of mode c2 of acoustic
signals are calculated and shown as a function of
percentage tooth removal in Fig. 11. From the gure it is
clear that the kurtosis values of acoustic signal fail to reveal
the increase in fault severity. Although kurtosis value of
mode c2 of acoustic signal shows a gradual increase in
kurtosis values from 3.6 to 14 which reveal an increase in
tooth fault severity.
Crest factor values are also extracted from mode c1 c6
listed in Table 7. The crest factor values obtained from
second modes are compared with crest factor values of
acoustic signals. It can be seen from Fig. 12 that EMDbased crest factor values reveal better diagnostic
information of fault growth from healthy gear to 100%
tooth removal cases, these values increase rapidly than crest
factor values obtained from time-domain acoustic signals.
Hence, for both bearing and gear fault diagnosis cases
EMD-based crest factor and kurtosis values provide
promising diagnostic information.

Fig. 11 Kurtosis of acoustic signal and mode c2 as a function of

percent tooth removal
Table 7

Crest factor values of IMFs (c1 c6)

Condition

IMF1

IMF2

IMF3

IMF4

IMF5

IMF6

healthy
10%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%

4.498
3.866
4.393
4.508
4.171
4.275
7.329

3.625
3.893
4.406
4.714
6.318
6.854
7.441

3.052
3.249
2.797
3.082
3.905
7.268
6.135

2.747
3.030
3.006
3.207
2.892
2.996
3.829

2.272
2.403
2.719
2.726
3.401
3.746
3.247

4.7408
5.6354
4.6725
6.6114
3.1007
4.5141
2.6414

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Fig. 12 Crest factor of acoustic signal and mode c2 as a function

of percent tooth removal

Summary and conclusions

Experiments have been carried out to diagnose simulated faults in

roller element bearings and helical geared system. Results
presented in this paper comprise measurement and analysis of
acoustic signals acquired from aforementioned machine
elements under healthy and faulty conditions. The kurtosis and
crest factor values of time-domain acoustic signals are estimated
to determine the conditions of bearings and gears. But these
values fail to reveal the reliable diagnostic information because
of their susceptibility to spurious effect of noise and nonstationary characteristics of faulty acoustic signals. In order to
overcome this disadvantage, an EMD-based statistical analysis
has been used to perform fault diagnosis. The results of
EMD-based kurtosis and crest factor values are compared with
kurtosis and crest factor values of unprocessed time-domain
acoustic signals. It is found that EMD-based statistical values
are very effective for early detection of faults and may prove to
be a powerful tool to indicate the various types of progressive
faults in rolling element bearings and gears. It would
be worthwhile to use this methodology on the other machines,
viz. I.C engines, machine tool spindles and so on.

References

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Appendix

Tables 8 11
Table 8

Skewness values of IMFs (c1 c6) (acoustic signals acquired from bearing test rig)

Condition
healthy
inner race
outer race fault
two faults on outer race

Table 9

IMF1

IMF2

IMF3

IMF4

IMF5

IMF6

0.03621
0.008943
0.010034
0.028712

0.01375
20.0220
0.07627
0.01894

0.01186
20.10168
0.00621
20.01563

0.00579
0.005594
0.018902
0.005392

0.00175
0.09818
0.09244
0.17686

0.01013
0.04989
0.36366
0.26486

Root mean square values of IMFs (c1 c6) (acoustic signals acquired from bearing test rig)

Condition
healthy
inner race fault
outer race fault
two faults on outer race

IMF1

IMF2

IMF3

IMF4

IMF5

IMF6

0.97349
0.50546
0.75849
0.62265

0.72957
0.7315
0.63217
0.58879

0.58733
0.42777
0.52647
0.82942

0.33737
0.4132
0.61836
0.78135

0.19854
0.2371
0.14606
0.2328

0.17105
0.36824
0.11631
0.15694

Table 10 Skewness values of IMFs (c1 c6) (acoustic signals acquired from a two-stage helical gearbox)
Condition

IMF1

IMF2

IMF3

IMF4

IMF5

IMF6

healthy
10% fault
20% fault
40% fault
60% fault
80% fault
100% fault

0.02916
0.01984
0.01916
0.02821
0.05157
0.01028
0.42609

0.00318
0.00552
0.00818
0.01781
0.03894
0.05601
0.15189

0.01524
0.00546
0.01524
0.03764
0.01506
0.03247
0.01017

0.00856
0.00684
0.00856
0.01345
0.02617
0.01266
0.01386

0.0602
0.03747
0.06021
0.01208
0.00492
0.00654
0.04250

0.19192
0.19528
0.19196
0.02071
0.04841
0.0792
0.0277

Table 11 Root mean square values of IMFs (c1 c6) (acoustic signals acquired from a two-stage helical gearbox)
Condition

IMF1

IMF2

IMF3

IMF4

IMF5

IMF6

healthy
10% fault
20% fault
40% fault
60% fault
80% fault
100% fault

0.9346
1.0506
1.4253
1.4659
1.6659
1.7913
2.0345

0.3816
0.5823
0.6674
0.7174
0.8009
0.8869
1.10216

0.3648
0.2881
0.5743
0.6876
0.2423
0.5333
0.6909

0.8643
0.2446
1.2176
0.7555
0.8976
1.4282
0.63232

0.2671
0.3428
1.1626
1.8487
1.7694
1.2618
1.1016

0.3410
0.1894
0.5289
0.5595
0.5595
0.8968
0.7366

IET Sci. Meas. Technol., 2012, Vol. 6, Iss. 4, pp. 279287

doi: 10.1049/iet-smt.2011.0082

287

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