A study on rotate vector reducer performance degradation based on acoustic emission techniques

This paper presents a performance degradation analysis for rotate vector (RV) reducer using acoustic emission (AE) techniques. Unlike the AE signals from fixed gear reducer that are steady and have unchanged route, the AE signals from RV reducer have variant propagation paths and strengths. This work investigates the kinematics model using AE techniques to solve the inherent issues of RV reducer performance degradation analysis, such as signal variabilities and inappropriate thresholds. Firstly, the propagation path of AE signals within the crankshaft is developed. Secondly, the attenuation trend of AE signals is exponentially formulated based on the corresponding propagation curve. The proposed method has been evaluated on the developed RV reducer platform. AE signals were collected under various working conditions, i.e., four abrasion states with eight types of loads and five rotation speeds. The experimental analysis on typical parameters (e.g., signal energies) proves the effectiveness and accuracy of the developed method based on AE techniques.