Fabrication of a test rig for gearbox fault simulation and diagnosis

Gearboxes are one of the most important and widely exposed to different types of faults in machines. Therefore, manufacturers and researchers have made significant efforts to develop different fault detection and diagnostic approaches for gearboxes. However, many research foundations, such as universities, are currently working on developing different gearbox test rigs to understand the failure mechanisms in gearboxes. As a result, in this article, a gearbox testing rig was proposed and fabricated to evaluate gear performance under lowspeed working conditions. It describes the primary mechanical apparatus and the measurement tools used during the experimental analysis of a multistage gearbox transmission system. The data-gathering equipment used to acquire the observed vibration data is also discussed. LabVIEW software was used to build a data acquisition platform using an accelerometer and a NI DAQ device. Then different vibration tests were conducted under different operating conditions, when the gearbox was healthy and then faulty, on this test rig, and the gathered vibration data were analyzed based on time domain signal analysis. The preliminary results are promising and open the horizon for simulating different gearbox test scenarios.