Professional Documents
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feb 2006
t h e m a g a z i n e f o r Pd M & C B M p r o f e s s i o n a l s
Alignment: Fountain of
Youth for Bearings
Uptime is a registered trademark of NetexpressUSA,
Inc. The following article is used with permission from
Uptime Magazine. Copyright© 2006 by NetexpressUSA,
Inc. All rights reserved.
www.uptimemagazine.com
vibrationupload
Acceleration Enveloping
A Key Element in Aggressive Condition Monitoring
By Greg Lee
A cceleration Enveloping, sometimes referred to as Demodulation, Shock Pulse Spectrum, or Spike Energy Spec-
trum, is a highly useful signal processing technique primarily used for the detection of rolling element bearing prob-
lems in the early stages of damage. Often acceleration enveloping is overlooked as a key analysis tool because little
is known about the measurement and how it is derived. The purpose of this article is to explain how Acceleration
Enveloping is derived and to show its usefulness in the early detection of rolling element bearing faults.
38 february 2006
Figure 2 - Unfiltered Waveform
For this explanation/example we are using while the other frequencies, especially below race, the impact causes the bearing compo-
an SKF 6203 bearing with a known defect in the haystack, are filtered out by the filter (see nents to ring at a high frequency. The ap-
the outer raceway of the bearing. The defect Figure 3). Now let’s see what happens to the plication of the high pass and low pass filters
is small enough that it is difficult to see with waveform when we apply a band-pass filter eliminates most of the other vibrations from
the naked eye. set to filter out the frequencies higher and the waveform. This, in turn, allows us to
lower than the haystack. clearly see the impact and ring-down within
Waveform the waveform created by impacts of the roll-
You can see in Figure 4 that as each rolling ing elements on the defect in the outer race
We will start out by looking at the waveform element rolls past the defect in the outer of the bearing.
emitted from the bearing. The raw unfiltered
acceleration waveform combines elements
of both low frequency vibration and high
frequency haystack from the resonating bear-
ing components. As you can see in Figure 2,
there is a lot of high frequency in the signal
which accounts for the thousands of small
peaks. You can also see underlying low
frequency vibrations which the high frequen-
cies ride on.
www.uptimemagazine.com 39
Notice that the time between impacts in the
waveform matches the time spacing between
the rolling elements.
40 february 2006
In Figure 9, we have displayed a wa-
terfall of acceleration envelope spec-
trums and a trend of the bearing’s
outer race frequency. This helps you
track and identify the increase in
intensity of the bearing outer race
defect over time.
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www.uptimemagazine.com 41
is fast becoming a key element in the
early detection of failing bearings in
most aggressive Condition-Based Main-
tenance Programs. Don’t miss using
this excellent technique to get ahead
of rolling element bearing problems in
your facility.
Conclusion
As can be seen, the results are impressive.
When comparing the spectrum to the normal
velocity spectrum, the bearing frequen-
cies are now prominent. The amplitude of
the frequencies is not as important as their
prominence above the noise floor. This is
the same for multiples of a driving frequency.
In our outer race example, more multiples of
the outer race frequency indicates that the
damage is more severe.
42 february 2006