Gear vibration analysis by B-spline wavelet-based linear wavelet transform

The signature of the vibration generated by a fault on a gear is carried by the sidebands around the dominant tooth meshing harmonic. This paper applies the linear wavelet transform based on B-spline wavelets to reveal the spectrogram of the sidebands exactly. The proposed wavelet transform uses 1/a for unit normalisation instead of 1/root a for energy normalisation, and can be computed easily and efficiently by the fast Fourier transform. An experimental example demonstrates that the development of a crack in a gear call be monitored simply by examining the spectrograms over a period of time. (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited.