New evaluation method for defects propagation in toroidal roller bearings using dominant frequency of acoustic emission

The increased use of roller bearings in recent years has made it vital to develop techniques for Condition Monitoring (CM) of these valuable assets. Toroidal Roller Bearings (TRB) are one of the recent inventions that has revolutionised some industries because of its unique design. In this study, newly produced TRBs were tested using Acoustic Emission (AE), vibration and temperature, on a specially designed test rig. The AE signal was recorded, processed, and analysed using FFT-based methods to transform from the time domain to the frequency domain, and to specify the Dominant Frequency (DF) of each hit in the signal. The result of the analysis was a layout on the time domain of the DFs of all AE hits along with RMSAE and other parameters, this layout was called DF map. The test was divided into three phases, and the DF bands were divided horizontally into three band groups. The aim is to establish a correlation between the phases and DF bands. Knowing the type of defects that are typical for each phase in the test provided insights to what are the DFs of that type. Promising results can be achieved using this measuring method on other types of bearings.