Characterization of wear-out of friction bearings with an electromagnetic sensor

Abstract

Electromagnetic (EM) sensors, by directly measuring the impeller of a rotating machine, offer a powerful way to detect not only defects on the impeller itself but to indirectly assess the condition of the bearings too, through the measurement of the displacement of the shaft and of the impeller. In this paper, a new method that uses statistical features computed on the time domain signals of a rotating impeller measured with several EM sensors is proposed. It is shown that the proposed method allows the full characterization the wear-out (type and quantitative evaluation of the wear-out) in friction bearings. A real world application of this method is presented.