Application of wavelets to gearbox vibration signals for fault detection

The wavelet transform is used to represent all possible types of transients in vibration signals generated by faults in a gearbox. It is shown that the transform provides a powerful tool for condition monitoring and fault diagnosis. The vibration signal from a helicopter gearbox is used to demonstrate the application of the suggested wavelet by a simple computer algorithm. The major advantage of the wavelet transform for analyzing the signal is that it possesses multi-resolutions for localizing short-time components so that all possible types of gear faults can be displayed by a single time-scale distribution resulting from the transform. (C) 1996 Academic Press Limited