A Review of Gear Fault Diagnosis of Planetary Gearboxes Using Acoustic Emissions

Despite the progress made in the last decades in the field of machine condition monitoring, there are still cases where the current state of the art is not enough and new technologies and advanced analysis methods are required to prevent unexpected failures. One example is planetary gearboxes (PGs), which are one of the main components of mechanical transmission systems in heavy-duty machines such as off-highway trucks, electric rope shovels, helicopters and wind turbines. Although those machines are usually equipped with vibration and temperature sensors to detect faults in mechanical components, these technologies might not be able to perform well under certain circumstances. Therefore, the applied investigation on new monitoring technologies in the field of machine condition monitoring is a necessary step. Among those, in this review the acoustic emission technology will be addressed as a tool for fault diagnosis of gear faults in PG.