Condition monitoring indicators for pitting detection in planetary gear units

In industrial field, there is an increasing demand for monitoring systems enabling predictive maintenance programs. In this context, the present work concerns the monitoring of distributed wear (pitting) in planetary gearboxes. For this purpose, some metrics of the synchronous average of the vibration signal, based on the statistical moment of the fourth order, are present in literature; in this paper, a new indicator is proposed, namely NA4mod. The effectiveness of this metric in identifying the early stage of pitting has been evaluated by conducting an accelerated life test of about 700 hours on a test bench using a back-to-back configuration. The paper introduces the proposed metric, describes the test, presents and dis-cusses the results. Metric NA4mod exhibits satisfactory capability to detect pitting with better reliability than other metrics in literature. In addition, the metric is shown to be sensitive to both early stage damage and pitting severity in the final stage. Results are verified by means of wavelet-transform analysis.