Vibration Monitoring of Rotating Systems

Most energy-conversion machines (e.g. vehicle engines and electric motors) involve rotating components (e.g. roller bearings and gears), which generate vibrations. The behavior of a pump which includes a deliberate fault was chosen to illustrate this assertion. The test bearing at the driven end of the pump’s motor was deliberately damaged using a 1.5mm wire-cutting method and an adjustable coupling disk introduced to impose a shaft misalignment of 40. The resulting undesirable behavior of the pump was observed. Experimental data were measured at various speeds of the rotor. The sample period at various operating frequencies were 0.9, 0.6 and 0.45s respectively. The ball-passage frequency was observed at 4.4, 8.8, 13.2 and 17.6Hz. A computer-based analytical model was developed, in visual basic, for monitoring the machine failures: this led to an integrated system-process algorithm for diagnosis of faults in rotating components.