Health Diagnosis and Fault Detection of Roller Bearings via Ultrasonic Technique

Roller bearings have been among highly inspected industrial products in recent years. Both condition monitoring as well as periodic inspection has been utilized to determine the status of bearings. Vibration analysis and acoustic emission have both been widely investigated in their applicability for the testing of bearings.These approaches are useful in case of bearing investigation during its life service and could help the user in implementing predictive maintenance. On the other hand, visual inspection is commonly used for periodic inspection and maintenance. Although, this approach could help in failure analysis and qualitative inspection of roller bearings, however, there isn’t any generalized method which could monitor the damage through quantification of surface damage level. There are different approaches for surface parameters quantification.. In this paper bearing surface geometry is investigated through Ultrasonic Spectroscopy. Three types of spherical bearings with healthy, somewhat faulty, and absolutely faulty status are investigated. Practical aspects of this approach are discussed herein and comments about future works are outlined

Keywords:

Roller bearing , Ultrasonic spectroscopy , Damage classification , Roughness