12/06/2013

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Diagnostic Techniques for the Vibration Analysis of

Bearings
INTRODUCTION
Bearings act as a source of noise and vibration due to their design as much
as the presence of defects in them, which may be classified into distributed
and localized defects. The fact that the load distribution on the bearings

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varies as the rolling element set rotates round the rings, causes the bearings
to behave themselves as a vibration generator. This behavior may arise as
much as from a geometrically perfect bearing as one which possesses
imperfections from manufacture, installation, lubrication or inadequate
ambient running conditions or some other factor that may help to cause
wear or fatigue.

LOCALIZED DEFECTS
The most common type of localized defect is the crack in the races or rolling elements, mainly caused when a crack due to
fatigue originated sub-superficially is propagated towards the surface until a metal piece is detached causing a small defect.
The fault caused by superficial fatigue is accelerated when the bearing is overloaded or submitted to shock or impact loads
during their functioning or installation and also with the increase of the rotational speed.

DISTRIBUTED DEFECTS
Different types of distributed defects include: the surface roughness, waviness, misaligned races and unequal rolling
elements. They can be caused by manufacturing errors, inadequate installation or due to wear. The variation of the contact
forces between the rolling elements and the races cause an increase in the vibration level. Because it is difficult to discern
when the vibration is caused by either distributed or localized defects, it is highly recommended to make an analysis based
on; one hand the frequency and, on the other the amplitude of the spectral components.

EVOLUTION OF THE FAULT DUE TO CRACK

STAGE 1
The symptom that appears when a fault arises at the first stage is a vibration with high frequency components (generally
higher than 5 KHz). This is due to the generation of stress waves which can excite natural frequencies of the housing and
the races of the bearings or the measuring sensor. In this stage, there is no temperature increase and the cracks are not
visible. It is generally not necessary to change the bearings.

STAGE 2
In the second stage the cracks start to be visible and the bearings produce audible sound and in some cases the
temperature rises. In this fault stage spectral components related to fault frequency of bearings in the low and intermediate
frequency range (less than 5 KHz) appear. These frequencies are commonly named as characteristic defect frequencies.
They are determined based upon the geometry and rotational speed of the bearing and can be calculated from simple
mathematical expressions or using commercial software. It is necessary in this fault stage to program the change of the
bearing.
Typical characteristic defect frequencies include:
BPFO (ball pass frequency outer race)
BPFI (ball pass frequency inner race)
BSF (ball spin frequency)
FTF (fundamental train frequency)

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STAGE 3
In a third stage, close to a catastrophic failure, the noise increases significantly an overheating may arise, the vibration in
the high frequency range decreases, the spectral components of the low frequency range increases and it will be necessary
to change the bearing immediately [5, 6]. Although this, the most usual way for it to show when a bearing develops a fault,
each bearing could have different fault modes with a different progression rate, it depends of the load, rotational velocity
and lubrication conditions mainly .

DIAGNOSIS TECHNIQUES
To detect a defect in an early fault stage, different techniques and instruments have been developed depending on the
range of frequencies within which the vibration analysis will be carried out. Some techniques have the high range frequency
analysis approach; others have the medium and low range approach. The techniques which analyze the high frequency
zone are based on the excitation of the natural frequency of the sensor, bearing parts and housing structures due to when
such a defect on one surface strikes its mating surface, a pulse of short duration is produced (see Fig. 1). When the bearing
rotates with a constant rotational speed, these pulses are generated periodically and the frequency is the characteristic
defect frequency.

Figure 1. High frequency waves produced due to a defect in the outer race.
The main symptom that allows detecting incipient defects is the presence of components of high frequency. When the fault
progresses, the impulse excitation increases even up to a time until when the edges, corners or rims of the defects smooth
down due to the wear and the impact levels diminishes and they can even disappear. Most of the techniques of high
frequency analysis give only an overall value of the energy caught by the sensor, which is compared with reference values
and related to the severity of the defect. Within these techniques, there are the shock pulse measurement (SPM), the
detection of acoustic emissions (AE), emitted spectral energy (SEE), High frequency Detection (HFD) and ultrasound.
Other techniques of high frequency analysis related to the excitation of natural frequencies are the techniques of enveloping
or demodulation and PeakVue or peak value analysis. Techniques that will be described briefly later in this work. In the high
frequency analysis there are two main difficulties; the first is the low amplitude of the high frequency bursts compared with
the other components of low frequency, secondly it is the difficult to identify the characteristic defect frequencies of the
bearings due to the noise and the poor spectral resolution.
To facilitate the tasks of diagnosis, it is necessary to isolate the high frequency vibrations from others using a high pass or
band pass filters around the natural frequency that is excited. Thus the vibration generated only by the impacts can be
analyzed identifying the discrete frequencies and evaluating the severity of fault. In this work we have analyzed two of the
techniques that can be used for this purpose, the demodulation and PeakVue analysis.

Figure 2a. Enveloped detector.

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Figure 2b. Peak value detector.

DEMODULATION
Basically this technique consists of using a high pass or band pass filter on the temporal signal, with the purpose of isolating
resonant zones of high frequency, then to rectify the modulated signal, to eliminate de DC component and finally using an
enveloped detector (Fig. 2a) and a low pass filter the modulator signal is obtained, how it is shown in Fig. 3.

PEAKVUE
This is a technique that captures the peak value of the stress waves that are produced (see Fig. 2b), and then uses a
spectral analysis to determine the repetition frequency of the impacts. PeakVue detects the presence of the stress waves
mainly due to metal to metal contact during an early stage of the failure. Like the demodulation, this technique isolates the
resonance zones by means of high pass or band pass digital filters, but it is differentiated from the demodulation technique
in that in the final stage the enveloped detector is not used, rather using a high frequency sampling (100 kHz ) catches the
peak value for each interval of the normal sampling time, see Fig. 4.

Figure 4. Peak Value detection using a high sampling frequency.

REAL ZOOM
The real zoom analysis, allows by means of digital filters to acquire the signal with a narrow bandwidth around the
resonant frequency, which must previously be identified. A spectrum with a good resolution is obtained this way, identifying
the modulator frequencies that actually cause the excitation of the resonant zone in an easier manner. In Fig. 7, the
obtained result of an analysis with real zoom around the resonant frequency of 60 Kcpm is shown.

EXPERIMENTAL STUDY
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In this work good shape ball bearings and bearings with a localized defect in the outer race ball bearing, were tested under
different levels of fault severity and various load and speed conditions. In these tests the normal spectral analysis,
demodulation, PeakVue and real zoom analysis, were used. A testing station as the one shown on Fig. 5 (characteristics are
shown on Table I), was used to carry out the testing. For the vibration analysis a CSI-2120 analyzer, high and low
frequency accelerometers (0.1 mV/gand 0.5 mV/g) and analog signals digital recorder were used.

Figure 5. Testing Station

The measured vibrations taken in the housing of the outboard bearing in a vertical direction were compared, between
faultless and faulty bearings. The testing was carried out at a speed 1000 rpm. In addition, 60 rpm and a 200-Kg over the
pulley were applied. In the faulty bearings the defects was intentionally made in order to simulate a defect at an early
stage.
In Fig. 6 the spectra in acceleration units, obtained from a faultless and faulty bearing for the turning velocity of 1000 rpm is
shown. It can be clearly observed in the faulty bearing spectrum a high energy vibration zone around the 60 Kcpm,
frequency which corresponds to a natural frequency. When a real zoom is carried out around this frequency, sidebands can
be distinguished in the spectrum with a separation between them to the BPFO frequency showing a fault in the outer race
(see Fig. 7).

Figure 6. Acceleration spectrum (Running speed = 1000 rpm)

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Figure 7. Real Zoom Analysis. (see the sidebands)

Observing the acceleration waveform, the periodicity of the impact produced due to the passing of the rolling elements over
the defect is identified as shown in Fig. 8.

Figure 8. Impacts identified in the waveform time.

In Figs. 9 and 10, the obtained results from the demodulation and PeakVue analysis are shown. In the case of the faulty
bearing the BPFO components and its harmonics are clearly identified, confirming the presence of a defect in the outer
race.

Figure 9. Demodulation (Running speed = 1000 rpm)

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Figure 10. PeakVue (Running speed = 1000 rpm).

When these techniques are applied to the low speed turning bearings (60 rpm ), in the acceleration spectrum the excitation
of the resonance zone in a faulty bearing is still observed. Applying the PeakVue and the demodulation techniques, the
presence of faults is identified but not clearly as in the former case.

DISCUSSION
From the results obtained in the different tests, we may conclude the following:
Independently of the running speed, in the fault bearing, an excitation over the high frequency zone is produced.
However, a lower intensity excitation is produced and the lower natural frequencies are excited in the cases of low
rotational velocity.
Using the real zoom and waveform time analysis, it is possible to identify the periodically produced impacts. In the
low speed cases the results obtained using these techniques were not satisfactory due to the low amplitude of the
impacts produced and they were also mixed with the low frequency spectral components.
The results delivered from the demodulation and PeakVue techniques were similar. Nevertheless, the amplitude
obtained using PeakVue were higher than when using demodulation. In low velocity applications it is more
advantageous to use these techniques rather than the traditional ones in which case the results obtained were not so
good.
It is important to keep in mind that this work was carried out under controlled noise and vibration conditions. In the
industry, more difficulties can be found especially in the low rotation speed machines due to the various noise sources,
vibrations coming from other machines and the speed and load variation during the measurements. Therefore the
traditional spectral analysis must be complemented with the use of other techniques which are nowadays available in most
commercial vibration analyzers such us the synchronic time average, the tracking filter and order tracking analysis.

CONCLUSIONS
It is possible to detect in the bearings the presence of defects when these are at an early stage, using vibration analysis
integrated with the demodulation and /or PeakVue analysis techniques which are centered on the high frequency analysis.
The demodulation and PeakVue techniques are more useful than the normal spectral analysis in the early fault detection for
the analysis of low velocity turning bearings.

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